Sacramento supervisor shares COVID misinformation, says children ‘do not die’ from virus
.JPG "Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost is surrounded by a transparent screen as she listens to public comment during the board’s meeting at the County Administration Building in downtown Sacramento on in 2021. Frost was the only supervisor who didn’t wear a mask at the meeting.")
Sacramento County Supervisor Sue Frost shared misinformation about COVID-19 at a public meeting, this week saying “COVID is gone,” “children do not get or die from the virus,” and describing vaccines for the virus as “experimental.”
Statistics from California’s COVID-19 database show that Frost’s statements are not correct.
The state’s latest update showed that minors accounted for 18.1% of COVID-19 cases in California, 352,734 of those cases among preschoolers and 1,532,288 in kids ages 5 to 17.
And, a new report this week from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention showed that 1,506 young people ages 18 and under had died from the disease.
Frost’s comments on the pandemic followed a presentation on COVID-19 by Public Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye at Tuesday’s board meeting.
Frost made a number of false statements that Supervisor Phil Serna asked Kasirye to address. Serna said he felt compelled to make sure “we don’t spread misinformation.”
For instance, Frost referenced a new California law that would make it easier for the state medical board to discipline doctors who promote COVID-19 misinformation. Frost said the law “does not allow medical doctors to not speak out against COVID.”
“The CDC and FDA are not medical doctors so now our medical doctors can no longer have an opinion but a governmental agency that is not elected can instruct our whole western medical allopathic system,” said Frost, a former registered nurse.
Kasirye countered that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration employ medical doctors.
Frost made incorrect remarks about the risks of COVID among children when she alleged the CDC and FDA are “heading toward mandating a childhood vaccine in order for our children to be in schools.”
“To give a shot to our children, who do not get COVID and die from COVID, to give an experimental shot to them, is just not right and I cannot condone it,” Frost said.
Kasirye replied that the COVID-19 vaccine, although encouraged, is not required for children to return to school under state or federal law.
Kasirye continued, “Children do get COVID and some of them get very severe diseases. We have had a few deaths as well….We have low levels of COVID but the virus is still circulating and we are still getting cases reported daily.”
On Wednesday, staff from Frost’s office provided a statement to The Sacramento Bee about her remarks. The statement said Frost “misspoke.”
“She very much misspoke when saying young people don’t get COVID,” said Frost’s office. “What she meant to emphasize was that the mortality rate for children is extremely low and danger to children, especially teens on suicide and drug use far exceeds the mortality rate for kids getting COVID.”
Sacramento supervisor on masks, vaccines
Frost throughout the pandemic consistently expressed skepticism of COVID vaccines and public health precautions meant to slow the spread of the virus.
At public meetings, county officials placed Plexiglass around her portion of the dais after she refused to wear a mask. Frost also joined an anti-vaccine protest in August 2021 outside a Roseville hospital where she repeated a widely debunked theory that forcing people to get a vaccine violates the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical principles created after Nazi medical experimentation on humans.
She voted against safety measures and called on the county’s grand jury to investigate the CDC in October 2021.
Serna in September introduced a resolution condemning COVID-related misinformation and committing the county to adhering to scientific facts. The measure passed by a 4-1 vote with Frost as the lone dissenter.
And last February, The Bee reported that Frost helped organize a “freedom convoy” to protest vaccine mandates. The rall did not occur.
‘No question’ children get COVID
Dr. Greg Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, Frost’s comments this week were wrong. He added “there’s no question” the virus can sicken children and trigger multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children and other life-threatening illnesses.
Early on in the pandemic, Poland said, children were less likely to get COVID-19 because their bodies had not yet developed many of the enzymes that SARS-CoV-2 was using as a portal to infect respiratory systems, but the virus has since evolved and found new ways to gain entry. Consequently, children no longer have any advantage in evading the disease.
Poland stressed that non-experts should be very careful about the information they share about COVID-19 “because it’s too easy to influence and hurt people,” explaining that he’s treated many severe COVID-19 cases where the likely sources of infection were children or grandchildren.
COVID is not gone, Poland said, but by the time Americans realize that they likely will have been exposed. Current testing of SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater showed that 500 of 600 U.S. communities had a 10% to over 100% increase.
Around Thanksgiving, Poland expects the death rate to double along with surges in illnesses and hospitalizations.
“What people fail to understand is this is a biologically dangerous virus. The American public is terribly naive about the nuances of this virus. They operate under a paradigm of: ‘What I don’t know can’t be real, and what I can’t feel must not be real.’”
This story was originally published October 27, 2022 at 1:46 PM.
