Sue Frost, the chair of the County Board of Supervisors, is an anti-science extremist
Sue Frost is not fit to be an elected official in the state capital, let alone the chair of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors.
But there was Frost earlier this week, sitting unmasked in the board chambers while every other elected official and county staff member observed a county health order recommending that all individuals, including vaccinated people, wear face coverings indoors.
Yes, the chair of the board of the biggest government in the region, the one charged with overseeing the county public health agency, is an anti-masker.
Let that idea sink in for a moment.
Plexiglass had to be placed around her portion of the dais at the county board chambers in downtown Sacramento as she was alone in her selfish defiance of science and public health.
It’s as if she were some State of Jefferson ideologue or red state political hack. But she’s right here in Sacramento, on the wrong side of history at a critical and dangerous time.
We can not laugh in smug righteousness at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or Colorado’s U.S. Rep Lauren Boebert anymore without acknowledging that, right here in Sacramento, we have Sue Frost as the local distributor of anti-science, anti-democracy demagoguery.
How is this possible? Her Antelope, Orangevale, Rancho Murietta, Rio Linda district is so red that local Democrats don’t even bother trying to find an opponent to take her on. In the 2020 primary, when Frost was last elected, her only opponent had no backing and introduced herself to The Bee’s editorial board by listing a series of jobs she had. One of them was “sex slave.”
I’m not kidding. It’s not funny. Frost won easily.
Parroting right-wing misinformation
What happens when a public official has no fear of a challenge to keep her honest?
Frost has gone all the way to the side of anti-science extremism. She is not only an anti-masker. She has shown herself to be anti-COVID vaccine.
Earlier this week, Frost appeared at an anti-vaccine rally in Roseville where she described COVID vaccines as “experimental.”
At the rally, Frost repeated a widely debunked theory that “forcing” people to get a vaccine violates the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical principles created in the wake of Nazi medical experimentation on humans,” The Bee reported.
What a coincidence.
At the County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, some anti-vaccine cuckoo birds repeated the exact same phrase of “Nuremberg Code” Nazi principles over and over again while proclaiming that COVID vaccines were evil.
“This is an experimental vaccine, it’s only approved under an emergency (CDC order),” Frost said in an interview with Fox 40. “It’s against everything we believe in. It’s against the Nuremberg Code, Western bioethics to force someone into an experimental drug without their consent.”
As The Bee reported: “In the interview, Frost also said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had recently determined that the polymerase chain reaction COVID-19 test ‘doesn’t work and can only identify influenza and cold,’ another debunked theory that has spread among anti-vaccine groups.”
When asked about her beliefs, Frost said the following to a Bee reporter in an email: “I believe in personal choice so that people who want the vaccine can get it, and those who do not want to get it do not have to. I am concerned that this personal choice is slowly being eroded and some people are being coerced to take it.”
A parade of cranks hijacking the board meeting, as they did on Tuesday while promoting easily debunked conspiracy theories about masking and vaccinations, is bad enough. But we also have an elected official in Sacramento County parroting the views of the nuttiest people abusing their First Amendment right with lies and misstatements.
Different year, same Frost
This isn’t a recent development.
In January, in the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Frost joined Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones, GOP gubernatorial candidate Kevin Kiley, and others at an in-person conference in Rancho Murieta that was in defiance of state health orders at the time.
Even then, as deaths and hospitalizations were peaking, Frost cast doubt on it all.
“Our understanding is that there are increased deaths, increased hospitalizations, due to people who have chronic illnesses or they didn’t take care of their preventative testing,” Frost said. “What I like to tell people is, ‘There’s more than one way to die.’”
Frost is hardly alone in her anti-COVID vaccine views. On Thursday, The Bee reported that Sacramento Area Firefighters Local 522, one of the largest employee unions in the city of Sacramento, would oppose vaccination mandates in the otherwise liberal state capital.
“The Sacramento Area Firefighters Local 522 is unwavering in our belief that our membership must retain the ability of personal choice,” wrote Chris Andrew, Local 522 President in a letter to the Sacramento City Council. “We will aggressively fight against any attempt to take away each of our member’s individual right to choose.”
That’s bad enough, but Frost is worse. She’s more than a misguided voice of a conservative-leaning public safety union. She is an elected official — a county supervisor. We expect and demand more from her.
She wasn’t elected in a rural county of California, or in the deep South. She is in the capital of California, where coronavirus cases are spiking again. Daily cases in Sacramento County essentially quadrupled in a month, from 7.2 per 100,000 residents for the week ending July 1 up to 28 per 100,000 by July 31, according to health officials in the county where Frost serves.
The delta variant is considered to have a viral load that is 1,000 times higher than previous strains of COVID-19, according to state health officials.
Yet Sue Frost, the chair of the County Board of Supervisors, is unmoved. She is a denier, an opponent of keeping people safe through science.
This makes her a menace, even to the people who might support her now for political reasons but would change their tunes if they found themselves in an ICU, fighting for their lives.
Stories of people who were vaccine deniers until the virus brought them down are common now. Politicians like Frost stoke the lies of anti-vaxxers. They put people at risk of sickness and death.
Frost is not fit to hold office and is a disgrace to Sacramento.
This story was originally published August 13, 2021 at 10:49 AM with the headline "Sue Frost, the chair of the County Board of Supervisors, is an anti-science extremist."
