To the Editor:

Last Tuesday’s (August 11) Enterprise ran a front-page article entitled, “Health Officials Quit or Get Fired Amid Outbreak.” The piece reported that “at least 49 state and local public health leaders have resigned, retired or been fired since April across 23 states,” according to the Kaiser Health News Service.

Why are we losing professional health care leadership at a time when we most need it? Many have had their lives threatened and the lives of their families threatened. Dr. Anthony Fauci, perhaps the most prominent and highly respected of our health care leaders, has had to hire personal protection for himself and his wife and daughters–simply for telling the truth about what we all need to do to stop the pandemic.

“…what we need for getting through this, first of all, is the truth,” according to Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins in the same article. Instead, our professional health care leaders have been harassed for recommending common sense measures like wearing masks and our president has treated us to a series of lies about the how the pandemic will disappear of its own accord in a short time.

Meanwhile, we have lost almost 170,000 fellow Americans in a few months–about three times those lost in ten years of war in Vietnam–and tens of thousands more will surely die without coordinated federal actions to guarantee adequate testing and other supplies as we move into the fall flu season. And without taming the virus we have little hope of our economy recovering or normalcy returning to our schools.

The long and the short of it is we need a dramatic change in leadership this fall, a president who takes responsibility for his job. And we need to vote out of office those who support Trump’s reckless indifference to the welfare of the nation, people like Elise Stefanick, who have enabled his incompetence and deceit. Tedra Cobb will put the interests of this district and the nation ahead of loyalty to a pathological liar.

Kirk Peterson

Lake Clear