Councilman Lloyd asserts Valley Health COVID vaccine mandate is the ‘emergency’

In an email response to Royal Examiner’s July 19 inquiry on what he considers the emergency nature of his ordinance proposal to prevent private-sector employers, among others, from reassigning or terminating employees who refuse the COVID-19 Coronavirus vaccine, Front Royal Town Councilman Scott Lloyd referenced Valley Health’s July 19 announcement of a vaccine mandate for all its employees and health care workers. Valley Health’s public relations department has been contacted for a response to Lloyd’s assertions and claim that he has been contacted by a significant number of their employees, including medical professionals, about concerns about being mandated to receive the vaccine. We will publish their response when received.

Lloyd also compared being mandated to receive the vaccine outside traditional, non-emergency drug approval standards to past abusive governmental medical practices, including “Tuskegee experiments” and “forced involuntary sterilization of the ‘unfit’.

Royal Examiner Photos by Roger Bianchini

“The emergency: The code defines emergency measure as ‘an ordinance or resolution to provide for immediate preservation of the public peace, property, health or safety’,” Lloyd began, adding, “In Tuskegee experiments and programs of forced involuntary sterilization of the ‘unfit,’ (even, or perhaps especially, here in Virginia), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services convened Commission to study the conditions under which testing might occur on human subjects,” Lloyd wrote, referencing a resultant “Belmont Report”.*

In addition to worrying over the speed with which COVID vaccines have been approved for “emergency” mass distribution without traditional approval processes, Lloyd’s references to testing, Tuskegee and forced sterilizations are telling in his perception of urgency in bringing his self-termed “Medical Freedom” or “Anti-Coercion” ordinance against mandated Coronavirus vaccinations forward on July 26, rather than August 2. More on that urgency below, but first some historical background on the councilman’s federal sterilization and Tuskegee program references leading to the Belmont Report. The writer apologizes for the length of this article, but believes context and detail are crucial to approaching council’s scheduled July 26 action on Councilman Lloyd’s “Medical Freedom” ordinance proposal. – So, get the popcorn kids.

Learning from the past?

According to an ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) link provided by Lloyd in his email: “One of the less well-known episodes in Virginia history is its practice of forced sterilization begun during the heyday of the eugenics movement in the early 20^th century – a Virginia-based movement that sought to protect the ‘purity of the American Race’.  Virginia’s legal sterilization program was enacted into law in 1924 – the same year the legislature adopted the Racial Integrity Act that prohibited interracial marriages.

“Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924 became the model for the nation after it survived constitutional review by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927). The high court ruled that the state’s law allowing forced sterilization of ‘any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility …’ for the greater welfare of society did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law … Tragically, it is estimated that between 7,200 and 8,300 people were sterilized in Virginia from 1927-1979 because they were deemed by society at the time to be unworthy or unfit to procreate. In most cases, the individuals were ‘patients’ at state mental institutions …”

WOW, but that’s not all.

A little online research revealed that the “Tuskegee Experiment” was a 40-year study (1932-1972) of “syphilis-infected Negro males” overseen by the U.S. Public Health Service and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is considered a U.S. governmental study unethical in nature in that it essentially used its subjects as lab rats, who were lied to about the nature of the study and from whom effective treatment of the disease with penicillin when it was discovered in the mid-1940s to be a cure, was withheld.

The study ended in 1972 after being outed by a report on it by the Associated Press.

Wikipedia observes: “The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. Although the African-American men who participated in the study were told that they were receiving free health care from the federal government of the United States, they were not.”

In 2021, the CDC website traces the study, its timeline, and its consequences:

“The study initially involved 600 Black men – 399 with syphilis, 201 who did not have the disease. Participants’ informed consent was not collected. Researchers told the men they were being treated for ‘bad blood,’ a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance.

A doctor injects patient in the Tuskegee Experiment – Wikipedia Public Domain/Source, National Archives

“In 1972, an Associated Press story about the study was published. As a result, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs appointed an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel to review the study. The advisory panel concluded that the study was “ethically unjustified”; that is, the “results [were] disproportionately meager compared with known risks to human subjects involved,” the CDC summary continues, adding, “In October 1972, the panel advised stopping the study. A month later, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs announced the end of the study. In March 1973, the panel also advised the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) (now known as the Department of Health and Human Services) to instruct the USPHS to provide all necessary medical care for the survivors of the study. The Tuskegee Health Benefit Program (THBP) was established to provide these services. In 1975, participants’ wives, widows and children were added to the program. In 1995, the program was expanded to include health, as well as medical, benefits. The last study participant died in January 2004. The last widow receiving THBP benefits died in January 2009. Participants’ children (10 at present) continue to receive medical and health benefits.”

In 1973, a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the study participants and their families, resulting in a $10 million, out-of-court settlement in 1974.

On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal Presidential Apology for the study. With a number of aging survivors and their family members present at the White House, President Clinton apologized for their experience of the Tuskegee Experiment:

“The people who ran the study at Tuskegee diminished the stature of man by abandoning the most basic ethical precepts. They forgot their pledge to heal and repair. They had the power to heal the survivors and all the others and they did not. Today, all we can do is apologize.”

Back to the Present

Back in Front Royal, Virginia, in July 2021, Councilman Lloyd believes the above histories have lessons for today. Of the Belmont Report grown out of the Tuskegee Experiment experience, Lloyd wrote Royal Examiner: “The Belmont Report states: ‘An agreement to participate in research constitutes a valid consent only if voluntarily given. This element of informed consent requires conditions free of coercion or undue influence’ …

“What Valley Health is doing clearly fits the definition of ‘coercion’, above,” Lloyd’s email of July 20 states, continuing, “Some people who would not take this vaccine are deciding to take it not because they want it, but because they are afraid of losing their job. Every one of these cases is an emergency, as is the fact that the major health provider in our town is engaged in a systemwide campaign of coercion and undue influence with regard to its employees.

Royal Examiner File Photo at ribbon cutting of Valley Health’s new Warren Memorial Hospital. According to Councilman Lloyd, a number of Valley Health employees, including medical professionals, have contacted him concerned about the new COVID-19 employee vaccination mandate by the regional health provider.

“Like I said, I have heard directly from dozens (two dozen just today) of Valley Health employees who feel they are being put in the impossible situation of having to choose between their livelihood (some of them have been health professionals for decades) and a vaccine they do not want. The widespread distress that this causes in our community is an emergency,” Lloyd asserts. “The people I am talking to will experience real harm without protection, and that economic distress will cause real pain in our community. Some of the people I am talking to are pregnant or have newborn children, some are carrying the insurance for their family, for some, Valley Health is the household’s only source of income. Many, I believe most, of these will be ‘subject to suspension or termination’ before our next regular meeting in August, so emergency action is necessary in July.”

We contacted Lloyd by email for elaboration on his apparent assertion that distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations might qualify as “medical experimentation” as opposed to distribution of adequately, if more speedily tested vaccines for a pandemic credited with taking nearly 4.1-million lives worldwide, over 611,000 nationally, including 61 in Warren County in about 18 months. It is a public health emergency considered to still be in progress, with a Fourth Wave surge being reported in many areas, particularly among unvaccinated populations.

The FDA perspective

Prior to receiving Lloyd’s Tuesday afternoon emailed response to our questions, we went to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) website to see that federal approval agency’s take on the COVID-19 vaccination distribution under a public health “emergency” declaration. The site asserts:

“The FDA has regulatory processes in place to facilitate the development of COVID-19 vaccines that meet the FDA’s rigorous scientific standards,” the FDA states. They elaborate that “The HHS (Health and Human Services) Secretary declared that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of drugs and biological products during the COVID-19 pandemic, pursuant to section 564 of the FD&C Act, effective March 27, 2020.”

Of the necessity of speeding up the testing and distribution process for what is considered by medical professionals around the world to be a public health emergency and worldwide viral pandemic, the FDA site adds: “FDA recognizes the gravity of the current public health emergency and the importance of facilitating availability, as soon as possible, of vaccines to prevent COVID-19 – vaccines that the public will trust and have confidence in receiving.”

Of course, if you believe the same, or same type, of people are running FDA, HHS, CDC or other federal agencies cited in medically obtrusive and immoral activities, some racist in nature, conducted in the early to mid-late 20^th century, such assurances may sound hollow.

Lloyd’s perspective

Of his perspective on the testing and approval status of COVID-19 vaccinations, Lloyd wrote Royal Examiner later Tuesday afternoon:

“I think that formally we remain in the trial phase for all available vaccines so I think the Belmont Report speaks directly to this situation. I think I would describe it as the ‘research’ or ‘trial’ phase; I doubt I would use the term ‘experimentation.’ I would probably describe the mRNA vaccines as ‘experimental,’ as they’ve never been tried in humans and it is not possible to know if there are any long-term effects from using them, which would be the type of potential harm that concerns me the most with that particular category.”

Links on the CDC website about mRNA vaccines development related to COVID-19

According to the CDC and other medical and news source websites, mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccines were among the first authorized for use against COVID-19 in the U.S., including the Moderna and Pfizer, the latter of which this reporter received his second dose of from Valley Health on February 3, fortunately with no side effects from either dose to this point. According to the CDC website, the mRNA vaccines “do not interact with human DNA in any way” and “do not introduce the live COVID virus” into the recipient’s body or cell nucleus. They have been researched for decades in the treatment of various health ailments including rabies, the flu and ZIKA, among other infectious diseases, the CDC notes.

Of the process by which they do work, the CDC writes of mRNA: “To trigger an immune response, many vaccines put a weakened or inactivated germ into our bodies. NOT (emphasis added) mRNA vaccines. Instead, they teach our cells how to make a protein – or even just a piece of a protein – that triggers an immune response inside our bodies. That immune response, which produces antibodies, is what protects us from getting infected if the real virus enters our bodies.”

It would seem that this process, avoiding some more cellularly intrusive methods of many traditional vaccines and with several decades of infectious disease research behind it, is why mRNA vaccines were among the first to be approved for use under public health “emergency” standards. But is that enough to allay the fears of some vaccine skeptics?

“The attitude of some is that, because of the large number of people who have received it, it is almost like they are not in trials anymore, (I have heard some doctors make this argument),” Lloyd wrote the Examiner, continuing, “I think these sorts of formalities matter, especially when dealing with a new drug.

“That said, I think that the Belmont Report* is a touchstone for matters of informed consent outside of clinical trials and ‘human research’ because it defines what is impermissibly coercive in the context of informed consent. In other words, when the trials end, I do not think that the behavior that falls under ‘coercion’ as defined in the report becomes ‘not-coercion’ because there is no more trial.”

Information or Opinion?

Perhaps the operative word in Lloyd’s analysis is “informed”.

First, one would ask: Is the federal public health apparatus and medical establishment “informed” enough to make an “emergency” judgement the vaccines distributed are safe for general human use?

And on the other side, the question is: Are those fearful of taking those “emergency” authorized vaccines “informed” enough on what methods the vaccines utilize in offering immunity against the COVID-19 Coronavirus, and what testing as been done to assure that the human health risk is minimal, and that, that risk is concentrated on those with specific pre-existing medical conditions?

For in the space between the answer to those two questions would seem to lie the legal justification for either a public or private-sector mandate that employees or members who have contact with other employees, members or customers must be vaccinated; versus as Councilman Lloyd and the constituent base he seeks to represent believe, such a mandate presents an immediate and dangerous health risk to them that municipal governments should legislate against, regardless of previous state or federal legal precedents concerning public health emergencies.

On the topic of “informed consent”, Councilman Lloyd wrote: “I have looked into AMA (American Medical Association) and other definitions of ‘informed consent’ and they mention freedom from coercion without defining ‘coercion’. I think the definition in the Belmont Report rings true and I would be surprised to find a definition anywhere that deviates widely from it.”

As to the question of the “informed” basis for his concerns, based on the health concerns of those he has heard from reluctant to be vaccinated, Lloyd claims a largely informed constituency:

“You asked about the validity of the medical objections, which I think I can answer quickly: I have not been looking very closely at the research at all. I see things mentioned here and there and some of them seem concerning, but my interest is not whether it is right. If a person does not want a vaccine because he thinks there are aliens in it; I would think he is wrong and I would also defend his right to decline the vaccine. I will say, though, that these are medical professionals: nurses, nurse practitioners, and doctors who are contacting me. I am not a medical professional; I would say they are in a better position to evaluate the various medical claims, and their perspectives are highly sophisticated, backed up with real stories of what is occurring ‘on the ground’ as they say.”

Decisions, decisions

So, remaining and fundamental questions facing town council July 26, appear to be: Are Lloyd and those he is hearing from operating from documentable facts concerning alleged medical dangers from receiving COVID-19 vaccines okayed for circulation by the FDA of 2020-21, or are their fears a result of susceptibility to alarmist conspiracy theories in wide circulation in an “alternate fact” social media universe?

As noted, Lloyd asserts many who have contacted him are medical professionals and Valley Health employees in a position to know “what’s going on, on the ground” regarding COVID vaccinations, or at least they claim to be. Perhaps some will show up July 26, to identify themselves, their credentials, and state the basis for their concerns about being vaccinated – perhaps.

How will Lloyd’s colleagues react to his introduction of his COVID vaccine-related ordinance as an ‘emergency’ measure designed to counteract Valley Health’s new mandate all its employees be vaccinated? – We’ll find out on Monday evening, at the WCGC.

Otherwise, Lloyd’s colleagues on the Front Royal Town Council will be asked to accept on faith that there is a pending employment emergency based on a legitimate and grounded-in-fact medical concern about the safety of the available COVID-19 vaccinations that somehow Valley Health and other involved agencies have failed to identify, or perhaps can’t be trusted to tell us the truth about if you accept a corrupt federal and medical agency lineage dating to 1924 to 1972. And if jumping that hurdle, council will then face a vote on a perhaps legally unsupportable ordinance proposal based on an assertion made by an anonymous group of alleged medical professionals, and their council sponsor who admits he has “not been looking very closely at the research at all”.

Lloyd did include in his communications with Royal Examiner that he will support public comments on his ordinance initiative during the general Public Concerns portion of council’s July 26 meeting. That sounds like an invitation to his concerned constituents to stand up and be heard, along with those who disagree that the Town has reason or jurisdiction to swim into murky factual and legal waters.

(*Writer’s note: The lengthy Belmont Report developed over 4 years in the wake of the public revelation of Tuskegee Experiment can be found online, one link leading to summaries and the full report is: The Belmont Report | HHS.gov)

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