Public health officials in the Polis administration need to cork up and take a back seat to the business of governing Colorado, leaving that work to the elected officials.
Even the ones we disagree with on a daily basis.
Thanks for all your “help” in shutting down the economy and screwing with our kids’ education as we round into year two of this pandemic.
But we can’t even find bullion cubes for Thanksgiving dinner and we’ll be opening Christmas presents on Valentine’s Day.
Your inability to see the big picture of our economy over the rim of your masks has become our problem.
Learn your place.
The policy wonks are mad because Gov. Polis isn’t bending to their demands to address a hospital bed shortage with a statewide mask mandate, and turning restaurant hostesses into Brown Shirts who demand vaccine passports before serving up a hot plate of nachos.
The editorial writers over at The Gazette accurately describe how public health officials are abusing their positions of authority and second-guessing how government should operate.
Yet, the state’s public health chiefs once again are making the rounds, lobbying anyone who’ll listen and engaging the news media with their familiar calls for ever-more-stringent, statewide curbs on public life. It appears they are dissatisfied with the state and local response thus far to the latest COVID surge, and they are going public with their displeasure at the state’s measured and focused approach.
The editorial board doles out some strong medicine in explaining why this increasing interference from the health sector of our state government will do more harm than good if Polis should relent.
The experts of the public health world have a laser-like focus that excludes other realities of daily life. It’s what shuttered our businesses, closed our schools, waylaid our economy and divided our society for much of last year. And it’s more or less the same kind of approach they seek even now. Given free rein, they’d muster all hands on deck, man all battle stations and fight like there’s no tomorrow. That’s their job, of course — but it’s also why they aren’t charged with running the state government.
In short, they’d have us wage war at any cost, regardless of collateral damage.
An elected governor, by contrast, is expected to know better.
Polis has so far refused to cave to their demands.
We just hope Polis has the will and the election year stamina to stick to his guns.