PHOENIX – In a week of uncontrolled spread of the pandemic in Arizona, Governor Doug Ducey took a media tour in Phoenix, defending his views on managing the one-year outbreak.
He chose not to stop at ABC15. More on that later. Let’s look at some of the insights he offered.
At the “Mike Broomhead Show” at KTAR, the governor revealed his plan that Arizona “will vaccinate us out of this,” a statement contested by pandemic experts.
In the same interview, he asked parents to “pressure” school boards to obtain full-time learning. The governor used the show to promote what has become a cultural war. He is frustrated with teachers concerned about his health and who dare to say so. He’s in a fight on Twitter with School Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, who is hyperconscious that the state’s own metrics don’t support personal learning.
Dr. Fauci and I agreed that the safest place for students to be is in the classroom, when community dissemination is low. Stronger mitigation efforts months ago would have helped to preserve face-to-face learning, but our state made different choices. https://t.co/X9BZpsqQOb pic.twitter.com/717zjav1jK
– Kathy Hoffman (@Supt_Hoffman) January 15, 2021
On the television side, the governor told 12 News that all the deaths, all the fear and anxiety, along with exhausted health workers, overcrowded hospitals, pressure to open schools, the shortage of vaccines and the dysfunction of the registration process – well, that’s just how a pandemic operates.
“I am listening to the public health experts who guide my decisions,” he insisted, at times irritated by anchor Mark Curtis, who pressured him with questions from the public about body and mask counts and requests for shelter at the site.
Except, he’s just listening to part of what these experts are saying.
The governor is especially selective with the facts when public health leaders diverge from their often repeated beliefs: That schools should be fully open to personal learning, no matter what the indicators indicate otherwise. The mandates of this mask do not work, do not work and are not applicable. That he is keeping Arizona open for business, even if those businesses are over-broadcast locations. And, his favorite self-analysis, “Critics can say what they want, but the path I have outlined is the right path for Arizona.”
We here at ABC15 would like to ask him for proof of this “right way” statement. We would like him to account for this impressive statistic, as reported by Mike Pelton of ABC15:
If more than 700 COVID deaths per week (never occurred during the summer) do not justify additional mitigation strategies, there is literally some scenario that @AZDHS and @dougducey would increase mitigation efforts? https://t.co/rJnrP2S0Ip
– Mike Pelton (@ MikePeltonABC15) January 15, 2021
We would like to ask why he is advertising more vaccination sites when the supply is not available to inoculate. We would love to find out what your real reason for opening public schools is. Is it really to help families? Or is he trying to neutralize two political enemies, Superintendent Hoffman and the Arizona Education Association, by positioning them as somehow anti-children and anti-family? We would like to find out why he chooses data to support his arguments, while ignoring the advice of experts from hospital leaders and university modelers who predicted a “humanitarian crisis” if he does not close the state.
We would like another opportunity to question the state’s pandemic manager, Dr. Cara Christ, the Director of the Arizona Department of Health Services. We would like her to answer why she went to court to protect the identity of the long-term care centers that are the hot spots of COVID, when we now know from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) that “Arizona health homes are in crisis”
We would like to know your role in a failed attempt last May to fire the state’s university modelers while President Trump campaigned in Phoenix to promote the denial of the pandemic. These modelers, by the way, nailed their predictions of the horrible results we are seeing now.
Unfortunately, it seems that ABC15 viewers will not hear our questions and answers from Governor Ducey in an individual interview.
Since last March, the governor has ignored repeated requests for interviews. Sometimes, his team offers hope that Ducey will join us, only to say later that “it doesn’t fit his agenda”.
On Tuesday, the Governor’s Office delivered an interview with Dr. Christ when she opened the massive vaccination effort at State Farm Stadium. After that, they complained that ABC15’s Kaley O’Kelley questions were “unfair”. Kaley asked her about the highest rate of spread of infection in America, about how to evaluate her own performance, about apologizing to the families of the dead. “Unfair.”
Because they believe that ABC15 is “unfair”, the governor’s advisers told me that he would not do an individual interview. Apparently, the answers to our questions don’t fit your talking points. They know that we will challenge their repeated claims that “public health experts” guide their decision. That, “We prioritize lives first”. That, “We regret every loss.” That we must trust “personal responsibility”. That, “I report to the people of Arizona.”
Respectfully, Governor, 2,817 of these people died in December alone. That is very unfair. We have some questions, please. Are you going to talk to ABC15 viewers or not?