Christmas Bazaar
Dear Editor: Sitka Counseling would like to say a big thank you to all Sitkans for showing their tremendous support for our agency and the bazaar.
We could not have completed this year successfully without our wonderful vendors, staff and especially the community! The day was filled with smiling faces; it was obvious you enjoyed yourselves as much as we did.
All of us at Sitka Counseling look forward to next year. Happy holidays!
The Sitka Counseling Staff
The Upshot
Dear Editor: As the COVID pandemic wanes, an after-action examination of the response from every level of governance will leave some of us at its ultimate effect with a jaundiced eye regarding the trustworthiness of those in authority in similar future events. Such skepticism will have to be accepted, however grudgingly, by those in power as well-earned and reasonable. Put another way, facing future such public head winds will be a fact of life in public administration.
Corona viruses were not unknown in this country to the epidemiological community in the U.S. prior to 2019. The SARS and MERS presentations in the early 2000s, as well as one of the viruses responsible for the common cold are semblant. The particularity of the SARS-COV-2 ought not to have been utterly unexpected, but, even so, the countermeasures offered in reactionary fashion by both the Trump and Biden administrations, which filtered down to every level of addressal, ran counter to journalized and peer-reviewed recommendations for such events going back decades; often these recommendations were based on the efficacy of response to actual events, such as the Asian influenza epidemic of 1957.
The greatest condemnation for the response lies in its basis in single-factor analysis. The effect on Americans was multivariate, yet our government’s response most closely resembled the present over-simplified zero-disease policy currently inflicted upon the People’s Republic of China - that is, laser-like focus on a fool’s errand. Focused protection, as reasonably espoused by the Great Barrington Declaration was simply castigated and buried by those in authority, not in any way empirically debunked. Truth was given a back seat to the prevailing narrative, and that narrative corroded the commonweal, and Constitutional rights, for the chimera of “greater good.”
Absent a lessons-to-be-learned mentality from our government to the SAR-COV-2 outbreak, together with a re-dedication by authorities to truth-telling and measured multi-factor rationality to a similar future occurrence, healthy skepticism of governmental pronouncements and actions in response to an unfortunate recurrence will be well-founded.
Charles Dean, Sitka
