Tacoma Woman Sent to County Jail for Refusing Health Department Advice on Treating her Alleged Illness

Tacoma Woman Sent to County Jail for Refusing Health Department Advice on Treating her Alleged Illness

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News


Unelected medical doctors can weaponize local “health departments” to incarcerate sick people who choose to reject a doctor’s medical advice for their alleged illnesses, as a current case in Tacoma, Washington illustrates.
Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen issued an arrest warrant for a Tacoma woman this week for allegedly refusing to take the advice of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department for the treatment of her illness, which they claim is “tuberculosis.”
This case is a classic example of how a medical doctor, in this case Dr. Anthony L-T Chen, the Director of Health of Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, who is an unelected politician, can order citizens to take certain medical treatments for their alleged illnesses, and if they disobey, can get a local judge to order them to be arrested for the purpose of forced medical treatments.
The News Tribune reported:

A Pierce County Superior Court judge on Thursday issued an arrest warrant for a Tacoma woman who has refused treatment for tuberculosis for more than a year.
Judge Philip Sorensen also upheld his earlier order requiring the woman to be confined in the Pierce County Jail or other qualifying facility for treatment and isolation until health officials determine she is safe to be discharged.
“Respondent’s objections to the order of February 24, 2023 are noted, preserved, and are insufficient to alter the court’s order,” he wrote in Thursday’s case update.
“The Pierce County Jail shall be authorized to transport (the patient) to an appropriate designated facility within Pierce County including, but not limited to Department of Corrections facilities. Such facility shall accept (the patient) upon initiation of request from Pierce County Jail.”
Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department in a statement Thursday said, “This patient is still refusing to isolate and get the treatment she needs to treat her tuberculosis. The civil arrest warrant … will authorize law enforcement to detain her on or following Friday, March 3 and take her to a facility equipped for isolation, testing and treatment.”
It added, “We will continue to work through the court and to pursue all our options to protect the community and persuade the patient to voluntarily seek the life-saving treatment she needs.” (Full article.)

Notice the language that the “Health Department” uses to describe their tyrannical martial law like actions: the woman needs to be arrested and put into the county jail so she can “voluntarily seek the life-saving treatment she needs.”
“Voluntarily”??
What is especially troubling about this particular case is that the woman in question does not even speak English, and was not only subject to the actions of the Health Department and County Judge, but had to also accept an interpreter only approved by the Health Department.
Her attorney has stated that she does not have proper understanding of the situation, and is denying that she has a medical condition. The attorney has also stated that the County Jail is the wrong place to treat this woman.

Tofflemire suggested that the woman’s lack of acknowledging and understanding what was happening was a significant factor in her refusal to voluntarily seek treatment.
Tofflemire’s filing stated, “She has not acknowledged the existence of her own medical condition. Because counsel is bound to represent the respondent’s stated interest, a guardian ad litem would be able to provide representation of her best interests, which are not currently clear.”
As for the woman not fully comprehending the proceedings, the department stated it had “provided respondent copies of all the orders in this matter in both English and her native language, a court certified interpreter has been at every hearing,” and that “native speakers have attended visits by TPCHD representatives and law enforcement.
“In addition, at every hearing where respondent was in attendance, this Court has provided an interpreter who translated the proceedings for respondent in real time. Respondent has thus been fully aware of the court’s orders and the rationale behind those orders.”
“Respondent has been given the opportunity to comply with this court’s orders to isolate and quarantine in the comfort and privacy of her home for more than a year,” it stated, and had repeatedly violated “by leaving her home without seeking treatment for her tuberculosis.”
It concluded that “the only viable course of action to protect public health is to require respondent to undergo treatment at the Pierce County Jail.”
[The Health Department] also rejected Tofflemire’s contention that treatment in jail is inappropriate at this point.
“The local health officer, through TPCHD, has approved the Pierce County Jail as the appropriate facility via this petition requesting detention and treatment of respondent,” according to the filing. (Source.)

These kinds of tyrannical actions by local Health Departments are not new, but because of what the entire country has just gone through with COVID for the past 3 years, more and more people are becoming aware that these local Health Departments are more about politics than they are about actual “health.”
When are we as a society going to finally start resisting these medical doctors turned politicians and their alleged authority to incarcerate people, or take away their children, for simply not taking their medical advice?
Eric Reinhart, writing for The Nation, addressed this problem with “Public Health” in an article published this week.

Want to Fix Public Health? Stop Thinking Like a Doctor.

A changing of the guard in US public health is impending—and, with it, a chance to rejuvenate a flailing field.
Anthony Fauci has retired in the shadow of one of the worst preventable disasters in history, and President Biden is moving to make new appointments while establishing a permanent White House Office for Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.
In doing so, Biden and his advisers must confront the fact that the rot in public health is structural: It cannot be cured by simply rotating the figureheads who preside over it.
Building effective national health infrastructure will require confronting pervasive distortions of public health and remaking the leadership appointment systems that have left US public health agencies captive to partisan interests.
Part of what has made public health vulnerable and a plaything of partisan politicking is the field’s gradual medicalization. Consider, for example, the history of the nation’s most important public health agency.
Since 1953, every director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has had a doctor of medicine, or MD, degree as their primary credential, with secondary degrees serving mostly as résumé decor.
Given that medical interventions constitute only 10–20 percent of modifiable factors affecting health, the backgrounds reflected in CDC leadership—and, likewise, at most state and local public health agencies—are notable for their consistent prioritization of narrow biomedical expertise at the expense of other fields that represent the remaining 80–90 percent of pertinent knowledge for making public health policy.
Physician and public health scholar Milton Roemer once observed that for the work of public health, “most of medical education is irrelevant.”
But neither doctors’ irrelevant medical knowledge nor relative ignorance of essential fields—labor history, social anthropology, political economy, epidemiology, environmental sciences—is the most troubling aspect of physician control of public health.
Rather, it’s the lack of epistemic humility, conferring an inability to recognize the limits and hazards of clinical reasoning, with which medical training often imbues them.
Clinical reasoning is not only not the population-level logic of public health; it is frequently antithetical to it. (Full article.)

COVID and the use of experimental COVID “vaccines” on the American public, treating us like lab rats, has completely discredited the medical profession, and the last place these criminal doctors should be is in an unelected political office deciding who should go to jail and lose their children for rejecting their medical advice, and who should not.
These medical doctors are the ones who should be appearing in a court of law facing criminal charges, and then incarcerated and banned from practicing “medicine.”
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THANKS TO: https://vaccineimpact.com/2023/tacoma-woman-sent-to-county-jail-for-refusing-health-department-advice-on-treating-her-alleged-illness/