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Health Department not offering flu shots

At Monday’s Western Upper Peninsula Board of Health meeting, Chief Health Officer Kate Beer said that there will not be any flu shot clinics put on by the department this fall.

In-house clinics are just not viable for us right now, we don’t have the staff. We’re gonna have to bring on staff somehow and if I can get it at no or little cost, that’s the way we will go with it.

There are three openings, two positions are expected to be picked up by personnel already with the department. The last will have a job posting available soon.

Beer went on to highlight Lake Linden and Ontonagon School Districts in their efforts to conduct contact tracing related to outbreaks of COVID-19 within their jurisdiction.

Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Van Howe presented on how to filter through medical misinformation. He said that even well-respected sources are not immune from making mistakes.

You gotta remember that even reputable journals screw up. The New England Journal of Medicine is famous for this, because they like to get a lot of publicity, so they’ll publish studies before they are ripe. They’ve published things that have been later debunked.

Van Howe says to check who conducted the study, how it was carried out, and who the participants are. Van Howe used an example of a study looking at the effects of masking dialysis patients and how that wouldn’t be a good predictor of what the policy’s effects on children could be. Van Howe highlighted anti-masking advocates, in particular, as an example of people not using good scientific judgement.

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