Eileen White resigned as an epidemiologist at the Fishers Health Department after a little more then two months on the job. After resigning, she posted a video on Facebook, which you can view at this link. Her bottom line message was this – the health experts are sometimes being overshadowed by politics and the health of the public is being harmed.
She then provided an interview with a local newspaper reporter where the story was framed in a way that made it appear she was blaming Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness for the political interference in local health matters and said she has never seen a health department run like a business, and insinuated that is what is happening in Fishers.
“This is absolutely NOT about Mayor Fadness being somehow ‘bad’,” Ms. White wrote in a Facebook post Thursday night. “I actually think he’s a reasonable man. I also think the leadership of the health department is not ‘bad’. I think they lack awareness of how the mayor being involved in meetings regularly and introducing a school board meeting and interjecting over and over isn’t exactly normal. He did not interfere in developing metrics. He did not tell us explicitly what to say. His presence and his level of involvement in health Dept stuff isn’t normal.”
Eileen White did explain what led to her resignation.
“(Mayor Fadness’) presence and involvement in a school board meeting interferes with independent messaging of the health department.” she wrote in the Thursday night Facebook post. “It doesn’t allow public health to be trusted and this is the National Issue I wanted to address.”
Ms. White adds she will be doing no more interviews. She only consented to the newspaper interview because the reporter told her there would be a story with or without her comments.
Her Facebook page – “Public Health Is Your Job, Too” – will be her way of communicating her views in the future.
I spoke with Ms White after that work session. Several families had texted me questions during the meeting. She was very kind and thorough in her answers. The most surprising answer was that the fishers health dept nasal swab tests have a 30-40% false positivity rate. I repeated it back to her to make sure I heard her correctly. Then the data isn’t valid
The 30% false readings is a statistic that has been stated in public for months. That is not new information. The deeper nasal cavity tests are said to do better, but the error rate is still very high.
The issue isn’t just on false positives, but also false negatives – so just as you might be quarantining people unnecessarily, you my also have asymmetric people showing up that believe they are negative.
The error issues go both ways. When you combine this with it taking up to two weeks (or more) to get data, it means you can’t make fast decisions. Just look at how the Fishers data flipped from a steep downward curve this past week to a steep upward curve on postivity due to delayed data reporting.