Fired Tennessee vaccine official received dog muzzle at work days before he was ousted

Tennessee’s top vaccination official, who says she was fired this week amid republican lawmakers’ disapproval of her promotion of Covid-19 vaccines to teens, was given a dog muzzle at work a few days only before his ouster.

Dr Michelle Fiscus’ husband Brad alleged the muzzle, which arrived in the mail, was intended to prevent his wife from speaking.

“Someone wanted to send him a message to tell him to stop talking,” he said.

The Tennessee Department of Homeland Security is investigating.

Fiscus said his dismissal on Monday was a political decision taken to appease lawmakers who disapprove of the Department of Health’s outreach to vaccinate teens against Covid-19.

In an interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes on Tuesday, Fiscus said his job is to roll out the Covid vaccine “across the state and make sure it’s done fairly and in a way that everything Tennessien wishing to access this vaccine is able to obtain one.

“I have now been fired for doing exactly that,” she wrote in an opening statement to the Tennessean.

However, new state documents indicate that Fiscus was fired because she was a bad leader and manager.

Tennessee Chief Medical Officer Dr Tim Jones said Fiscus should be withdrawn in part due to complaints about her leadership approach and the way she handled a letter on underage immunization rights that sparked the indignation of Republican lawmakers, state records show.

Jones wrote in a letter dated July 9 that Fiscus deserved to be fired because of “the inability to maintain good working relationships with members of his team, his lack of effective leadership, his lack of proper management and his refusal to consult his superiors and other internal stakeholders on projects (vaccination program against vaccine-preventable diseases).

Jones’ letter, which was written to Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey, also alleged that Fiscus had not delegated enough and asked to use the department’s funding for a nonprofit she has founded.

Brad Fiscus, however, has circulated three of the last four years of performance reviews, deeming his wife’s work “outstanding,” including a work review from October 2019 to September 2020. The couple did not learn about it. of the July 9 letter as Thursday and asked why it was not used in the Ficus dismissal on Monday, Brad Fiscus said.

Fiscus’ 2019-2020 performance review said she had exceeded expectations “in managing all programmatic activities” and “campaigned appropriately and effectively for her team.” He also noted that his program had “key transitions” that had been “well managed”.

Outrage over adolescent vaccination

Fiscus said tension with GOP lawmakers escalated when she released a document on Tennessee’s “mature miner doctrine,” a 1987 state Supreme Court decision that states residents of Tennessee ages 14 to 18 can be treated “without parental consent, unless the doctor thinks the minor is not mature enough to make their own health care decisions.”

The health department subsequently halted any vaccination campaign for minors – and not just for the coronavirus, according to email records, which were first reported by The Tennessean.

The change came two weeks after a June legislative hearing in which Republican lawmakers berated the agency for how it communicated about the vaccine, including through online posts.

During the hearing, Republican State Representative Scott Cepicky held up a print of a Facebook ad saying teens were eligible, and he called the agency’s plea “reprehensible” and called it off. compared to peer pressure.

Only 38 percent of Tennessee’s population are vaccinated, placing the state in the bottom 10 for vaccination rates. Covid-19 cases have started to rise again, with the state average of new daily cases increasing by 451.4 in two weeks, according to researchers at John Hopkins University.

In a statement Thursday, Health Commissioner Piercey said there had been “no disruption to the childhood immunization program or access to the Covid-19 vaccine as the department assessed marketing efforts annuals for parents “.

In an email to NBC News this week, Bill Christian, a spokesperson for the Department of Health, did not comment on reports that the state had halted all vaccination campaigns among minors, but said that the ministry “wants to remain a reliable source of information to help individuals, including parents, make these decisions,” Christian wrote.

He added that an “intense national conversation” affects the number of families who assess immunizations in general.

“We are just aware of how certain tactics could hinder this progress,” Christian wrote.