Last updated on January 3, 2023
Barbara Ferrer, Public (Health) Enemy #1 in Los Angeles and California
Yesterday, Barbara Ferrer did it again. She extended LA County’s lockdown for…wait for it…another 3 months.
Who is Ms. Barbara Ferrer? Let’s start with the LA Times’ Steve Lopez, who writes a day in the life pieces about stuff. (You might remember Lopez from when he wrote about his boat ride after Hurricane Katrina. Any pets who didn’t drown were starving and stranded on rooftops or rafts. A desperate dog paddled out to his boat, and Lopez did nothing to save the dog, who then got caught in a current. He wrote a followup piece making fun of the people who reamed him out for that.)
In this recent fluff piece about Barbara Ferrer, Lopez refers to her as “LA’s version of Dr. Fauci”! Of course, as he correctly points out, she’s not a doctor (or a scientist). She did think about being a doctor, she says, and confides that she met Dr. Fauci once. Does that count? And is she capable of ruling 10.7 million people? We shall see.
In Ferrer’s role as the top health officer in a county of 10 million people, she’s in the middle of every tough conversation about which businesses and institutions have to shut down, whether public and private hospitals are equipped and prepared to handle a possible surge, and what each of us has to do to make a difference.
That’s peculiar. Isn’t it HER job, to make a difference? It’s certainly not her job to tell anyone how they should contribute to society.
Barbara Ferrer Director LA Public Health Bio
Ms. Ferrer was born and grew up in Puerto Rico. She went to college and worked in Boston in public health, and became Director of LA County Health 2 years ago. LA County Health has about 4,500 employees, so keep in mind that her first responsibility, like all bureaucrats, is to make sure she has the budget to keep them all employed. (Just a guess: everyone there is “essential” and is still working?)
In the 2 years she’s been in office, running this county of 10.7 million, her main concern up until now has been the health of the homeless.
“Homeless people are, in fact, dying at a higher rate because they are homeless,” said Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of County Public Health. (from Daily Breeze.)
Even though Ferrer is not a doctor or medical professional, she has several degrees, that the LA County lists in every press release. (They also call her Dr. Ferrer, which is extremely misleading in this medical pandemic.) She is a PhD (Philosophy of Social Policy – how to manage certain social groups, like kids, immigrants, or homeless), MPH (Master of Public Health – how to prevent disease through hygiene and other measures) and MEd (Master of Education – to be a teacher.) She does NOT have a medical degree or training.
Her past press releases through LA County Health are weak, and include: There’s a chill in the air, it’s smoky out, polluted water at the beach, and more deaths from vaping. Obviously, Public Health likes to add up numbers. But how and why did they jump to be fortunetellers and alarmists about a new virus (“Novel Coronavirus”) no one has seen before?
Fear Porn from Barbara Ferrer
Ms. Ferrer declared a local public health emergency when only 6 people out of 10 million tested positive! Is this rational? And on March 26, she said “There could be over a million people that would be infected.” What, is she the new Stephen King?
On March 24 from the Times, LA County announced a teenager died from it. “This is a devastating reminder that COVID-19 affects people of all ages,” L.A. County Public Health Department Director Barbara Ferrer said. A few hours later she said: Oops, my bad. It wasn’t a coronavirus death. That would have been such a great lesson to teach us, that we’re all going to die, though, wouldn’t it?
It is absurd that the Director of Health has been allowed to exaggerate, predict, and shut down an entire city and state with scant data and wild sensational guesses. As the LA Times pointed out, they don’t even have accurate numbers of cases, and that’s on purpose. On March 20:
Los Angeles County health officials advised doctors to give up on testing patients in the hope of containing the coronavirus outbreak, instructing them to test patients only if a positive result could change how they would be treated.They are not planning to test patients who have the symptoms but are otherwise healthy enough to be sent home to self-quarantine — meaning they may never show up in official tallies of people who tested positive. [my bold]
That means that positive cases with no or few symptoms won’t be counted against fatalities.Yet LA County announces new deaths every day. The first couple of weeks, the press releases would read someone died from “complications from Novel Coronavirus.” Now it’s just a lie, pretending the only condition is this virus:
“These numbers represent people in our community who have passed away from COVID-19…” said Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, Director of Public Health.
Fudged numbers from public health
In addition, major correlations have been left out of the County health reports by Ferrer. Very recently, the County started to admit that the overwhelming majority of deaths from the coronavirus are from those with pre-existing conditions (93%!). There have also been hints from many cities that the deaths are concentrated in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. On April 26 the County suddenly issued a new order just for nursing homes! Why just for them? I suspect most of the fatalities are coming from these homes, and the County just won’t admit it.
There are 10.7 million healthy people in Los Angeles County who have been locked down in chains for 7 weeks now, many voluntarily wearing masks in their terror.
Since most people DON’T live in nursing homes, and DON’T have pre-existing conditions, wouldn’t a transparent Public Health Officer want to allay people’s fears, and enable them to go live healthy independent lives?
Early on, Dr. Fauci pointed out that most cities don’t need “draconian” lockdowns like Los Angeles has. But Barbara Ferrer just plowed ahead. She made the choice to emasculate the millions of free, healthy adults, to pay penance for the dead. And yesterday she extended the order for 3 more months, to kill any free thinkers or businesses still left alive.
Reason Magazine pointed out that Barbara Ferrer has not stopped emphasizing the negatives:
When she announced the startling results of a new COVID-19 study on Monday, Los Angeles County’s top public health official emphasized that the number of infections far exceeds the official count of confirmed cases. She underplayed another important implication of the study: COVID-19 seems to be far less deadly than many people feared.
Don’t Stay Home and Rot, Stay Safe with Civil Liberties Intact!
An experienced public health worker like Ms. Ferrer would be aware that historically, pandemics and epidemics have been grossly overestimated. She knew this coronavirus isn’t a super-virus, and can’t leap buildings in a single bound. Her absurd commandment that over 10 million people should wear a piece of cloth stapled to their face has nothing to do with prevention; multiple studies prove that masks are bad at catching spray, and can even transmit infection. Face coverings are, rather, a way to identify outliers, allow public shame and bullying, and indicate to the public and government that the emperor at least ordered cloth, even though she has no clothes.
In addition, the position of Public Health Director has been severely compromised. Instead of protecting the 10.7 million healthy adults, and continuing to recommend exercise, sun, and stress-reducers, Ferrer has given orders to shut down every park and beach within 4 thousand miles, shut down all non-essential businesses, industries, social life, income, travel, etc. The effects of isolation, fear, and depression are incalculable — more than half of Los Angeles is single people!
The future looks bleak. As Reason wrote:
Will they [public health departments] be guided by emerging evidence, or will they use it to support the policies they already favored?
What would Barbara Ferrer do?
** Just as I was finishing this up, Deadline posted about the 3 more months Ferrer ordered:
Chaos ensued. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti appeared on CNN not once, but twice yesterday to walk back Ferrer’s remarks. Ferrer herself then issued a statement doing the same.
Our Mayor is denying she ordered this! Oops again! Stay tuned.
[…] Taxation without representation is tyranny, right? For example, we certainly did not elect Barbara Ferrer, Dictator of the Health Dept. Anyway, LA now requires face masks to be chained to our face. I won’t do it. I won’t […]
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