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This Presentation is scheduled for Tuesday March 1, 2022

On July 12, 2021 Tennessee state health officials, under extraordinary pressure from the state’s Republican lawmakers suddenly fired Dr. Michelle “Shelley” Fiscus after four years of service due to her efforts to reach teenagers with information about how to get vaccinated against Covid-19.  Dr. Fiscus said the agency presented her with a letter of resignation and a letter of termination, but no reason for why she was being let go. After choosing the termination letter, Fiscus penned a blistering 1,200-word response published in The Tennessean in which she said she is “ashamed of Tennessee's leaders, afraid for her state”, and "angry for the amazing people of the Tennessee Department of Health who have been mistreated by an uneducated public and leaders who have only their own interests in mind."  Fiscus told The Associated Press "I don't think they realized how much of an advocate I am for public health and how intolerant of injustice I am…" 

Fiscus said in an interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes that her job was to roll out the Covid-19 vaccine “across the state and to make sure that that was done equitably and in a way that any Tennessean who wanted to access that vaccine would be able to get one.”  In a written statement to The Tennessean newspaper she said “I have now been terminated for doing exactly that…”  She further stated that “tension with GOP lawmakers escalated when she publicized a public document on Tennessee's "Mature Minor Doctrine," a state Supreme Court case ruling from 1987 that states that Tennesseans 14 to 18 years old may be treated "without parental consent unless the physician believes that the minor is not sufficiently mature to make his or her own health care decisions…According to Fiscus, the health department’s attorney provided her the letter she shared with medical providers about the mature minor doctrine. The attorney had said the letter had been “blessed by the governor’s office.”  At a June 2021 hearing, Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey said she knew of only eight times this year when the doctrine was invoked, and three of them were for her own children, who received vaccines while she was at work.

Discussion Questions:

1.      Should public health officials, especially medical doctors, be able to speak frankly about their medical recommendations to the public they serve, even as a doctor might speak frankly about their recommendations to an individual patient, without having to fear losing their job?

2.      How much power to implement public health policies should public health officials have?

3.      How do your views line up with Dr. Charity Dean’s views about this issue?

4.      Do you feel comfortable with politicians, most of whom are without medical training or expertise, deciding how to deal with a world-wide pandemic in your community and in ways that effect you and your family?

5.      What role should the courts play in implementing public health policies?

Quotes from The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

…local U.S. public-health offices reminded him of public services in Poland, but before the collapse of communism…these are the symptoms of a failed state.” (p. 255)

Each health officer knowing or having reason to believe that any case of the diseases made reportable by regulation of the department, or any other contagious, infectious or communicable disease exists, or has recently existed, within the territory under his or her jurisdiction, shall take measures as may be necessary to prevent the spread of the disease or occurrence of additional cases. (pp. 14-15)

She soon realized how few people, in practice, knew the law…The public-health officer had somehow come to be a recessive character. (p. 15)

… “To do the job of local public-health officer, you basically always need to be willing willing to lose your job.” (p. 32)