Tennessee attempts double reverse COVID triple Salchow

Vaccine ban? What vaccine ban?

Tennessee Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey is back from the Greek isles.

What do these numbers have in common:  39, 45, 36, 41, 142?

Answer:  they’re the COVID numbers for the state of Tennessee.  Only 39 percent of Tennessee residents are fully vaccinated.  The state is 45th in the nation in the number of its citizens who have been vaccinated.  The number of new COVID cases in the state is up 36 percent in one week, with the number of hospitalizations due to the virus up 41 percent.  The last number, 142, is the percentage COVID deaths have increased in one week.  A hundred and forty-two percent.

The number of deaths from COVID is what they call a “lagging number,” which means that with hospitalizations up, the number of deaths will increase even more than it already has, because hospitals are where people with severe COVID usually die. 

With Tennessee looking down a very dark tunnel that has no discernible light at the end, the state last week fired Dr. Michelle Fiscus, its top vaccination official, because she had the temerity to get very verbal about vaccinating teenagers.  Republican lawmakers called for her dismissal at a time when her boss, the state’s top health official, Dr. Lisa Piercey, was vacationing in the Greek islands.  The state announced that all vaccine outreach programs to minors would cease.  Not just COVID vaccinations, all vaccinations.

But fear not, dear citizens of Tennessee!  Dr. Piercey is back from sunning herself on the beaches of the Greek islands in the Mediterranean and has announced that the state will be restarting its outreach to minors and will once again be recommending that teenagers be vaccinated against COVID.

“Nothing has been stopped permanently,” Piercey told the local press. “We put a pause on many things, and then we have resumed all of those." Piercey claimed the Tennessee Department of Health had not stopped providing vaccines, but only reduced its “communications and marketing” about vaccinations.

Reaching out to teenagers themselves would have been “against our view about the importance of parental authority," Piercey explained.

So while COVID vaccinations in the state have completely stalled-out and the number of new cases has quintupled over the last month from 198 to 918 per day, and the number of people hospitalized with the disease rose from 220 to 480 over the same time, the state of Tennessee has decided that the rights of the teenagers’ parents are more important than the right of teenagers to stay alive.

"The reason that we paused is because we wanted to leave no room for interpretation about where we are shooting,” the Tennessee State Health Commissioner explained.  “We are shooting to get the message to parents.”

Foot, meet gun barrel.  Gun barrel, meet foot.