Exclusive: California sheriff overruled health official, linked man’s death to vaccine
When the Placer County Sheriff’s Office announced in January that a man had died just hours after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, the surprising news reverberated around the globe.
Sheriff Devon Bell’s statement on Facebook quickly became another nugget of misinformation used by anti-vaccine activists to discredit the COVID-19 vaccine, universally considered the only way to safely end a pandemic that has killed millions.
But Bell’s unexpected, unusual announcement could have been avoided if his office had listened to warnings from the county’s own medical experts, according to emails obtained by The Sacramento Bee.
A Placer County health official pleaded with the Sheriff’s Office not to release a statement that implied a local man had died from a COVID-19 vaccine. But the sheriff refused to back down, even though the man’s autopsy results were pending, according to the emails.
The emails show a tense internal debate about the death of a 64-year-old health care worker who had received the vaccine five hours earlier in Auburn.
The sheriff’s statement on Facebook reported that the unidentified man had received a shot “several hours before their death” on Jan. 21. County health officials appeared to know right away that such an announcement would feed into unfounded fears about the vaccine.
“We strongly believe it is premature to do any public messaging surrounding this death,” Dr. Rob Oldham, the director of Placer’s Health and Human Services agency emailed Undersheriff Wayne Woo. “We can see very little benefit to public health in doing so and substantial potential detriment.”
In his Jan. 23 email, Oldham told Woo that he knew the undersheriff wasn’t going to change his mind. But to try to limit the damage, he agreed to help draft an announcement posted on Facebook later that day with more muted language, rather than the sheriff issuing a statement Oldham’s agency “could not defend.”
Oldham’s fears were quickly realized, even though the statement made it clear an official cause of death was pending. A week later, after widespread backlash, the Sheriff’s Office put out a second announcement saying the man hadn’t died from the shot.
It had merely been a coincidence.
Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University, said the sheriff’s decision to forge ahead with the announcement over the pleas from local health officials was “terribly irresponsible.” He said the announcement may have had lethal “ripple effects.”
“That could potentially lead to a number of people choosing not to get vaccinated, who then get infected, who then potentially even die,” Scott said. “So this is a matter of life and death.”
The Sheriff’s Office continued to defend its decision in an emailed statement.
“As a result of the compelling information, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office felt it was important to inform the community of this significant incident,” said Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Angela Musallam.
Oldham declined an interview request.
“We value our partnership with the Placer County Sheriff’s Office Coroner Division, and look forward to continued collaboration and working toward shared solutions with them,” he said in an emailed statement.
Experts say what the Sheriff’s Office did was a case study in what not to tell the public before an actual cause of death is known — a process that takes time.
The challenge with giving any vaccine to millions of people is that inevitably some people will die soon after, regardless of whether it was the fault of the shot.
“If we do anything to a large number of people, whether it’s vaccinate them or tap them on the shoulder, or give them a glass of sterile water to drink, some bad things will happen to some of them in the hours and days and weeks to follow,” said Dr. Arthur Reingold, who heads of the epidemiology division at UC Berkeley.
“Simply observing that somebody was vaccinated and then had something bad happen, hours or days later, doesn’t mean it was the vaccine that caused it.”
County initially kept emails secret
The remarkable Jan. 23 email exchange between Oldham and Woo was obtained by The Bee under the state’s Public Records Act. Initially, Placer County refused to release any records. It was only when The Bee’s attorneys stepped in that the county began unsealing them in stages, the first batches released on the past two Fridays.
The emails black out any identifying information about who the dead man was, and they’re speckled with redactions.
But they show in a striking manner how Sheriff Bell’s office insisted on alerting the public to the death, even as medical professionals urged patience since it wasn’t yet known why the man actually died.
“Forensic pathologists are still compiling information about what happened to the decedent (just received his body in the last hour) Autopsy not completed yet,” according to a Jan. 22 email from Musallam, a sheriff’s public information officer, to Lt. Nelson Resendes.
Musallam’s email to Resendes included an early draft of the statement that would appear on Facebook the next day. Initially, the statement provided little information, but throughout the day, the Sheriff’s Office refined the statement and added to it.
At the same time, the emails show that throughout that Friday, Placer County’s health leaders had alerted the top doctors overseeing the vaccine program at the California Department of Public Health about the investigation. They sent them the man’s medical records.
At one point Saturday, Oldham copied several of the state’s top health officials to the emails including California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly and Dr. Tomás Aragón, the director of the California Department of Public Health.
The emails show the county’s health team had expected news of the man’s death to leak to the press, but they had no plans to make a formal announcement about the man’s death. In case a member of the media inquired, they had drafted a general statement saying it was being investigated. The draft made no mention of a vaccine being a possible cause.
“As shared, we don’t have plans to proactively issue anything over the weekend,” Katie Combs-Prichard, a Placer County health department spokeswoman, emailed Musallam and Resendes at the Sheriff’s Office. “If you all would like to use it as a joint statement that either of us could share with media upon request … just let us know.”
Around two hours later, Woo, the undersheriff, emailed the sheriff, Musallam, Capt. Shayne Wright and Resendes to request feedback on the sheriff’s latest draft.
“The Placer County Sheriff’s Office Coroner Division is currently investigating the death of a 64-year-old man,” the draft reads. “The decedent had recently been administered the COVID-19 vaccine before being transported to a hospital for a possible allergic reaction to the vaccine. The decedent, who did have other underlying health issues, passed away at the hospital. The case is currently under investigation and no other information can be released by the coroner at this time.”
“To my knowledge, everything is factual. Support,” Wright replied.
Ten minutes later, Resendes emailed his colleagues that he thought it would be “appropriate to let (public health) know we’re releasing something.”
When word got to Oldham, the county’s health agency director, that the sheriff was going to proactively release its own statement, he urged Undersheriff Woo to hold off until more was known.
Oldham emailed him the next morning — on a Saturday — telling him he still believed the sheriff shouldn’t send the announcement, but he said that based “on our conversation last night, it is clear to me that you have a different opinion.”
“While I strongly disagree with that opinion and really wish that (Health and Human Services’) opinion would be respected on this, it sounds like you may have already committed to another course of action,” Oldham wrote.
Given that Woo wasn’t budging, Oldham said he was willing to help craft the statement that went out on Facebook that afternoon. The public statement Oldham helped write removed the line that implied the man may have had a reaction to the shot.
Oldham also agreed to speak with someone close to the dead man.
“(Redacted) is obviously very upset, but sounds like (redacted) is coping pretty well, all things considered,” Oldham wrote. “(Redacted) did express some concern about media attention, and I promised that we would try to avoid using details that might help the media to identify (redacted) by name.”
Meanwhile, Oldham spent that Saturday emailing the state’s health department giving them a heads-up that the sheriff’s statement was coming and getting their input on what it should say. He also notified county health officers in the Sacramento area, and he alerted the executive directors of the state’s health officers and county health executives associations.
“We held our sheriff-coroner off until now, and managed to get (the state health department) and the sheriff to agree on the following language,” he said in one email that included a copy of the statement just minutes before the initial Facebook post went live.
The email exchanges provide few clues about why the Sheriff’s Office was so motivated to release the statement.
“The county should have a statement prepared because it’s likely (redacted) is going to leak the facts to the media and will likely have an attorney,” reads a Jan. 22 email from Resendes to Musallam.
It’s not clear what person he was referring to.
The next day, Musallam, the information officer, wrote to her supervisors it was the public health agency’s “role to educate the public on the latest regarding COVID and vaccination protocols/policies, to prevent an unfortunate situation like this from happening again.”
‘Accuracy trumps instant gratification’
The sheriff’s initial Facebook post went viral almost immediately. The short-but-alarming statement ricocheted around the internet and was reported by Fox News and Chinese state media. The Bee wrote a short, five-paragraph story on the announcement.
Anti-vaccine activists quickly shared it widely, even as others, including the state’s top health official tried to warn the public against jumping to the conclusion that the vaccines were harmful.
“These are safe vaccines. We are watching them successfully administered across the globe,” Ghaly told reporters.
Meanwhile, those managing the Sheriff’s Office Facebook page grew defensive when people commented on the announcement and called the decision to release the premature information harmful to the goals of mass vaccinations.
“If you’re unhappy with the set of information we have provided, feel free to unfollow this page,” the Sheriff’s Office responded to one comment.
Another woman commented that the post was “vague and terrifying.” The Sheriff’s Office replied, “Too bad. We also have protocols and policies to follow, and we are releasing what we can to the public. Accuracy trumps instant gratification here.”
A week later, the sheriff apologized for those remarks in the statement that said the vaccine had nothing to do with the man’s death.
“We have learned that not only had he recently been diagnosed with COVID-19, he also had underlying health issues, and had been exhibiting symptoms of illness at the time the vaccine was administered,” the statement read. “Clinical examination and lab results have determined the COVID-19 vaccine has been ruled out as a contributing factor in the individual’s death.”
That comes as no surprise to vaccine experts.
“I have no reason to believe that the vaccines would kill anyone,” said Scott, the Stanford physician and infectious disease specialist. “Even if a billion people got vaccinated, I don’t see any biological reason why these vaccines would lead to someone’s death.”
A typical vaccine trial might have 3,000 to 6,000 participants over a longer period, but the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines clinical trials had a combined 70,000 volunteers. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine trials had 44,000 volunteers. No one got seriously ill, and no one died from COVID-19 after receiving the vaccines.
A very small number of people — no more than five out of every 1 million people given COVID-19 vaccines — have reported allergic reactions to the federal government’s “adverse events” online vaccine reporting portal.
State Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, a physician and vocal proponent of vaccines, said he was especially troubled that the Sheriff’s Office disregarded the advice of the leader of the taxpayer-funded agency tasked with messaging around public health and vaccine safety.
Pan said any misleading statement public officials issue about vaccines quickly became part of misinformation campaigns and lies anti-vaccine activists tell to try to convince the public vaccines aren’t safe, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.
“We know these stories, especially when they’re put out by public officials ... will be used by the anti-vaccine extremists to try to discourage people to get the vaccine,” he said. “The sheriff for Placer County is basically saying someone died after the vaccine. And they (the activists) will then say, ‘Look, the sheriff said the vaccine caused someone to die.’... So why would you want to prematurely put this out?”
This story was originally published March 30, 2021 at 4:42 AM.