Despite new federal limits on who can get a Covid-19 vaccine and the arrival of the cold and flu season, many Vermonters can still get a booster, though details surrounding Medicare reimbursement and federal recommendations remain uncertain.

In a late August post on X, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Food and Drug Administration approved Covid-19 booster shots, but only for those 65 and above or with existing health risks. 

Vermont state officials are now awaiting a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which typically guides public health directives and insurers’ coverage, for those who want to get a fall booster shot.  

“Really the best thing that I can recommend is either to go online and see if you can set up an online appointment (for a vaccine), or call pharmacies in your area to see if they’re available,” said Julie Arel, the state’s interim commissioner of health.

In Vermont, pharmacies are moving forward with administering the vaccine. Kinney Drugs and CVS have the updated Covid vaccines in stock. Pharmacies order directly from the manufacturer. Providers — doctors’ offices and other clinics — often get vaccines through the state, which is not yet able to order the vaccines from the CDC. 

Kinney Drugs’ spokesperson Alice Maggiore confirmed that the stores can administer the 2025-26 vaccines to people above 65 and individuals between 12 and 64 who attest to having one of the qualifying conditions, as outlined by the CDC. 

CVS is able to vaccinate anyone over 5 years old, who attests to eligibility under the same CDC’s preexisting conditions list, or anyone older than 65, according to a company executive, Amy Thibault. 

The underlying risks outlined by the CDC range from asthma or a smoking history to mental health disorders, like depression obesity, or physical inactivity. Patients do not need a doctor’s prescription to confirm the underlying condition at Kinney or CVS, both spokespeople said.

Typically, insurers cover vaccines received in a pharmacy. Whether some private and government insurers will be able to cover the vaccines remains uncertain. Even if people can get the vaccine by walking into a pharmacy, it’s unclear if they will have to pay for it:  “It’s a little bit mind boggling,” Arel said. 

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, the state’s largest private insurer, plans to continue to cover the vaccine for any member, at no cost and with no prior approval, said Andrew Garland, a vice president and spokesperson for the insurer. Blue Cross Blue Shield of VT intends to do so through 2026, as well. MVP, the state’s other private insurer selling plans on the marketplace, also does not anticipate changes in its vaccine coverage policy, said Elizabeth Boody, a spokesperson for the company. 

What employer-sponsored insurers and providers like Tricare, the military health system, might be able to cover, is still unclear.

Since the FDA has already approved the vaccine for those over 65, it is likely that Medicare, which covers the same age group, will cover the vaccines. Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at the University of California Law, San Francisco, told NBC News that once the FDA approves a vaccine, Medicare has the authority to cover it.

Generally a Covid vaccine undergoes three steps for approval: First the FDA authorizes the new vaccines — which it did in August. Then a panel within the CDC called ACIP (short for Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) issues a recommendation on the vaccine. It is scheduled to meet Sept. 18-19, to do so. This year many are holding their breath ahead of ACIP’s announcement, since Kennedy gutted the panel and replaced it with many vaccine skeptics. 

The state is weighing whether and how it will need to break from that typical process, and is currently exploring what Vermont statute allows for breaking with that process.

While it is quite common for providers to prescribe a drug outside of what the FDA has authorized them for, it’s not typical, however, for that to happen with vaccines. The FDA’s lack of formal guidance on what qualifies as an underlying condition leaves room for interpretation surrounding who qualifies for the vaccine.

“There’s some flexibility in there, but because it’s not as clear as usual, there is going to be hesitancy, in all likelihood,” said Arel. “And anytime there’s hesitancy, anytime there’s confusion, it’s going to lead to lower immunization rates. We really want to try to avoid that.”

The Department of Health is also looking to Vermont’s neighbors in the Northeast for direction, Arel said. In August, the department joined with other state health departments in the region to build a coalition ready to respond to shifts in federal guidance. Though the group has no unified recommendation, she says it’s something they are considering to help mediate the current disjunctive state of vaccine recommendations and approvals. 

“If as a region, we can become more aligned, it helps people across the whole Northeast region to feel a level of confidence in their state public health department’s decisions and how we’re moving forward,” she said.

In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healy required in-state insurance carriers to cover the vaccines recommended by the state’s Department of Public Health, even if they are outside of the federal recommendations. The state’s commissioner of public health also issued a standing order that allows pharmacists to issue Covid shots to anyone over the age of 5. 

In response, Arel said Vermont is watching its neighbors and looking into where state statute might allow for potential action. 

“Getting clarity and having a message be clear and simple, is going to be the most important thing we do,” Arel said. “Unfortunately, we are still working through all of that, but we are committed to finding our way through it and making it as simple and easy as possible.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: As feds tighten Covid vaccine rules, Vermont works to maintain access .

Vermont Foodbank, the state’s largest food assistance provider, cut nearly 10% of its workforce two weeks ago.

The organization let seven employees go and discontinued two vacant positions. CEO John Sayles said Tuesday that the cuts were necessary for the company to avoid financial hardship down the line, as food banks become more stretched nationwide.

The Covid-19 pandemic more than doubled the food bank’s level of financial resourcing for a time, Sayles said, through increases in federal, state and philanthropic support. The organization grew from 60 to 88 employees, reaching its peak in 2023.

“We had to do what was in front of us,” Sayles said of the organization’s growth at the time.

Now, the picture is different — many COVID-era public programs have ended.

In addition, Vermont Foodbank said it was losing roughly 20% of its USDA food stock earlier this year due to federal budget cuts.

This restructuring also comes as cuts to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program threaten to leave thousands of enrolled Vermonters without coverage. About 65,000 people currently receive aid from SNAP across the state.

The timeline of these changes is uncertain, and Sayles said he was concerned that higher burdens on food shelves will collide with the need to downsize. “It really is hard to predict when and how things are going to roll out,” Sayles said.

The layoffs are intended to put the organization in a more sustainable position so “we can do the best we can to meet the need,” he said.

It’s unclear how much the food bank will immediately save through restructuring. Sayles estimated the personnel costs for the food bank will be roughly the same next year, even with fewer employees. 

Sayles said some pay raises were necessary to cover cost-of-labor adjustments, rising health care premiums and the need to retain talent.

The organization said it will try to protect against gaps in services, but the layoffs may put some parts of the operation under stress. 

“Everyone was doing work that was having an impact,” Sayles said.

He added that Vermont Foodbank had been in touch with a number of local partners to discuss how they might be able to pick up the slack. 

“Whether every single thing that the food bank did is going to continue to happen, I can’t say,” Sayles said.

Disclosure: VTDigger has partnered with the Vermont Foodbank during member drives.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Foodbank lays off nearly 10% of staff, braces for uncertainty.

The federal government announced Wednesday that it would cut $11 billion in Covid-19-related grants to local health agencies, including $6.9 million to two departments in the Vermont Agency of Human Services. 

A spokesperson for the Department of Health, Kyle Casteel, provided a statement on behalf of the agency Thursday that called the cuts a “sudden termination” that would “negatively impact public health in our state.”

Most of the funds, about $5 million, were allocated for vaccination programs at the health department. The statement said the grants began during the pandemic but have continued to support the department’s work beyond the pandemic. 

Among the uses of the funds were to “detect and prevent the spread of infectious disease, ensure Vermonters can access vaccines, help address health disparities among the populations and communities we serve, and more,” the statement said. 

The Department of Mental Health projected losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the statement said. The programs it expects to see cuts include community-based support, crisis response and access to care for “vulnerable Vermonters,” the statement said. One such program provided team-based early treatment for psychosis to young Vermonters. 

“While these grants were always intended as temporary, the demand for mental health services remains high, and this loss of funding will have consequences,” the statement said. 

The statement said the departments were still working to understand the full implications of the cuts. 

The Covid funding cuts were the latest in a series of changes to health-related spending at the federal level. On Thursday, national news outlets reported that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services planned to lay off 10,000 workers and shut down certain agencies within the department. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Federal government cuts almost $7 million in Covid-19 grants to Vermont.

MONTPELIER — Five years ago this month, the Vermont Legislature decided to adjourn — for at least a week — as lawmakers’ concerns about the spread of Covid-19 began to mount.

“We’ll see what happens,” then-House Speaker Mitzi Johnson said, as Statehouse staff started preparing to close off the building. “A week or two from now, I can’t imagine where we’ll be.”

It would be far longer than that, of course, before lawmakers got back to business as usual. 

Reported cases of Covid-19 soon exploded across the state, and by May, when the House and Senate would have adjourned for the year under normal circumstances, the virus was sending dozens of people at a time to the hospital and had killed at least 55, according to state data.

Legislators conducted most of their business from home in 2020 and 2021, with staff scrambling to stand up meetings on Zoom and livestreams of those proceedings on YouTube. Lawmakers planned to return to the building in 2022, but then backtracked over concerns about Covid-19’s highly transmissible Omicron variant. It wasn’t until January 2023 that lawmakers gaveled in for a legislative session that would, ultimately, take place entirely within the Statehouse walls.

If an immediate impact of the pandemic was to push legislative work out of Montpelier, though,  one lasting impact, five years on, has been the way it jolted a deeply analog institution into the digital world — and, in many ways, made lawmakers’ process more accessible to the public.

After coming back into the Statehouse for good, lawmakers opted to continue streaming video of their work, prompting a need for new cameras and screens throughout the building. 

“When the Legislature returned to some version of in-person operations, it was immediately clear to both legislators and staff that this type of technology, this type of access to the legislative process, was invaluable — and would never go away,” said Kevin Moore, director of the state’s Office of Legislative Information Technology, who helped lead that process.

More people are testifying in committees than before the pandemic — no doubt because they can do so from their homes and offices, sometimes avoiding a long drive from far corners of the state, Statehouse leaders agreed in recent interviews. There are also likely more eyes on each committee’s work, they said, with each hearing streamed and archived on YouTube.

Previously, committee work was relatively difficult for the general public to access. Hearings were audio recorded, but the sound quality was often spotty and tapes hard to come by. Only floor proceedings — again, in audio form — were livestreamed, thanks to Vermont Public.

Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden-Central, who has served in the chamber since 2011, called the changes “one of the real silver linings of the pandemic.”

“I think what we have is a more robust process all the way around, with many more people participating,” he said. “So, it’s an ironic legacy of the pandemic — which was ‘don’t get together’ — that we now have many more people involved in the government process.”

Frustration and flexibility

Remote legislating wasn’t without its hiccups, Baruth said. Some meetings faced technical problems that prevented the public from viewing the proceedings live online, and lawmakers did not always halt their work in the meantime. At least one hearing, meanwhile, was hacked.

First-time lawmakers, especially, were frustrated by the challenges of learning the ropes of the job from home, missing out on the informal conversations with colleagues that are key to political work.

Others, including those legislators who work other jobs during the session, found the remote life offered a newfound degree of flexibility. In the years since lawmakers returned to the building, and concerns over the spread of Covid-19 subsided, they’ve kept some form of rules allowing one another to attend or participate in committee hearings or floor proceedings remotely.

In January, for instance, the House approved updated guidelines allowing its members to cast up to three votes remotely in committees, for any reason, for the rest of the calendar year.

House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, said changes to allow remote participation also make it easier for legislators who have young children, or are taking care of elderly parents, to serve in Montpelier — which she’s seen as a step forward. 

“I think there’s a recognition, that we didn’t have before, that flexibility is really important,” said Krowinski, who’s been in the House since 2012. “I think that is something that’s good, and that we’ve made progress on. And I’m not sure that would have happened if it wasn’t for Covid.”

Easily-accessible video recordings have also changed the way some lawmakers approach their work in committee hearings, according to John Bloomer, the secretary of the Senate. Bloomer said some, in his view, seem less inclined to speak candidly than they were in the past. 

“I don’t think you get the exact same debate you used to,” said Bloomer, himself a former senator who’s had his job as the chamber’s top rule-keeper and counselor since 2011.

Before the cameras were in use, “being around a good committee was like being around a kitchen table in a Vermont family. When you discussed things, sometimes you’d say really stupid things, and sometimes you (didn’t),” he continued in an interview. “I think people are a little more hesitant, given all the broadcasting, to actually discuss in front of the live cameras.”

Back in the building

The flip side, Bloomer acknowledged, is that the technology makes it easier for the public to hold lawmakers accountable for what they say. A common scene in the Statehouse includes reporters, as well as lobbyists, hunched over laptop screens watching YouTube recordings of live or past proceedings — sometimes while others are taking place in front of them.

Rebecca Ramos, a lobbyist with the Montpelier-based Necrason Group, called the remote access “amazing” — though said it sometimes discourages advocates from attending hearings in person, where it’s easiest to impress on lawmakers and pick up on their many reactions. 

Ramos encourages her clients to come into the Statehouse whenever they can.

After years of Zoom work, “we basically had to retrain our clients,” she said. “Like, no, you don’t get to stay home on Zoom. If you want this change to happen, you have to be in the building.”

The return of in-person legislating brought its own challenges, too. Vermont’s Statehouse is notoriously short on space, with cramped committee rooms that were prone to spreading disease even before considerations over airflow and ventilation were commonplace.

(Officials have been in the process of overhauling the building’s HVAC system in recent years, though those plans predate the pandemic.)

In late 2021, lawmakers ordered the Statehouse’s sergeant-at-arms to impose room capacity limits ahead of their planned return to the building. But those limits later sparked criticism from leaders of news organizations across the state when several reporters were turned away from covering committee hearings in-person, because the rooms had reached their limits.

Legislative leaders increased some committee room limits shortly after in response. 

Concerns over disease-spreading also prompted lawmakers to shuffle some committees around the building to rooms that offered more space — including two large rooms on the building’s first floor, Nos. 10 and 11, that were previously used for many public meetings.

Covid-19 also renewed conversations about longstanding proposals to expand the footprint of the Statehouse and create new committee rooms and other public spaces. Progress toward an expansion has been slow, with a legislative panel last fall sending one proposal back to the drawing board over concerns its roughly $11.5 million cost was too high, WCAX reported.

It wasn’t until this year that House committees moved out of rooms 10 and 11, after two new committee rooms were built out on the building’s mezzanine level. Baruth, the pro tem, said he thought that returning those rooms to public use also brought back a sense of normalcy.

“To me, that’s really the bookend of the COVID era — is those rooms coming back,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: 5 years ago, Covid-19 shuttered the Vermont Statehouse. Then, it opened up the building in new ways..

This is the first story in a two-part series that looks back on the impact of Covid-19 in Vermont after five years. The second story, “A visual history of Covid-19’s path through Vermont,” can be found here.

Five years ago, Vermont health officials announced the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the state. 

Since then, 1,200 Vermonters died from Covid, countless residents were infected and hundreds of thousands of Covid jabs were put in the arms of Vermonters. 

Last month, the health department announced that it would stop publishing Covid death and case data after years of daily and weekly tracking. The change is the latest shift in how Vermont now views Covid as an “endemic” disease, more like the flu or other seasonal illnesses than a pandemic that stands as the forefront of public health priorities. 

Vermonters have gotten older, but has the state gotten wiser? Are officials better and more prepared to tackle public health crises as they arise? Or is Vermont primed to repeat a cycle of needless suffering and death?

The legacy of Covid goes well beyond the impact of the virus itself. Covid has left Vermont with tools that could help address longtime public health challenges along with emerging threats — and with vulnerabilities in public trust and health systems. 

Officials at the Vermont Department of Health say that Covid was the most daunting challenge they have ever faced, but it left them with new tools and structures that they have implemented in their day-to-day work. 

They also celebrated the state’s track record with the virus. Vermont has one of the lowest Covid death rates in the nation, behind only Hawaii and Puerto Rico, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But that’s not how Anne Sosin sees it. A lecturer at Dartmouth College and health equity researcher, Sosin reflected on how Covid revealed disparities in Vermont society that continue to today. 

Sosin said Covid has added to the “burden” of illnesses like flu and RSV on hospitals and health care workers in the winter months. It has also added a “large footprint” of disability, she said. While long Covid is the most well-known aftereffect of contracting Covid, experts are just beginning to understand how a Covid infection can cause long-term health impacts on multiple body systems. 

Covid has left Vermont — and the nation — with a lasting legacy of mistrust and misinformation, one that appears to be affecting public health response at a federal level, Sosin said. She said the measles outbreak spreading in the U.S. has been fueled by vaccine skepticism that began long before the Covid pandemic, which then amplified it. 

“We’re gonna see a lot of tragedies over the next few years,” Sosin said. “It’s going to get a lot worse before we, ultimately, recognize we have to rebuild.”

Mark Levine, the outgoing commissioner of the health department, echoed that concern in an emailed statement.

“While when compared to national data Vermont remains a leader in immunization – even with numbers I would not brag about – it worries me that the uptake on preventative measures like vaccination has declined so shortly after the pandemic reminded us why they are so necessary,” he wrote.

Pandemic-era innovations

Covid has left a mark on how the health department is able to respond to other public health challenges, staff said. 

One of those developments has been Covid wastewater surveillance, which allows state and local governments to measure virus levels in a community by taking samples at wastewater treatment plants. 

“Wastewater surveillance was done in academic institutions and for research purposes prior to Covid, but it really became a public health tool during Covid,” said Patsy Kelso, the state epidemiologist. 

The department’s public health lab is now gearing up to use wastewater surveillance to measure mpox, seasonal influenza and Candida auris, a hospital-related illness, she said. 

The scientific community is also investigating how to utilize mRNA vaccines, developed for Covid, on other infectious diseases like the flu as well. Antigen tests that can detect both Covid and the flu are already on the market. 

Helen Reid, then the state director of health surveillance, said the pandemic also revealed the need for the state department of health to work more closely with community groups that represent marginalized Vermonters. Covid had a disproportionate impact on Vermonters of color, older residents and people with disabilities. 

“The very first year of Covid really sort of laid bare what we’ve known for a long time, which is that health disparities have an impact on high-risk populations and underserved populations, and we saw that in Covid time and time again,” said Reid, who now leads the health department’s infectious disease division. 

Vermont responded by targeting vaccine outreach to those individuals, and some of that effort has changed the way that the health department continues to collaborate with marginalized communities. The health department just had its first “tabletop” exercise — an emergency-preparedness simulation — with community groups like Migrant Justice and Bridges to Health, she said. 

Sosin also noted the importance of community organizations in responding to Covid in a different way. Early in the pandemic, local efforts like mutual aid groups formed an integral part of helping to reach vulnerable Vermonters. 

“Early in the response that communities would … have a telephone tree, and they would see who was at risk, and they would shop for groceries (for those people),” she said. “We don’t sometimes think of that as public health, but those are the things that enable people to comply with public health.” 

The pandemic response at a state and federal level included a vast expansion of social programs that directly — and indirectly — affected people’s health. 

“We saw the unprecedented use of housing policy as a tool for pandemic control” with the housing of unsheltered Vermonters in motels and the moratorium on evictions, Sosin said. 

The federal government expanded Medicaid eligibility, extended the Child Income Tax Credit and provided several stimulus payments. Those initiatives had a concrete impact on child poverty in the years they occurred. 

The federal government also lifted restrictions on telehealth, which was beneficial to rural health access, she said. “Unfortunately,” she said, that flexibility is about to end unless the federal government extends it — one of many programs Sosin said was at risk. 

‘Emerging threats’

In the early months of 2025, President Donald Trump issued executive orders withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization and cutting foreign health aid. His administration announced hundreds of millions of dollars of funding cuts to institutions conducting health research, something that has Sosin worried about the country’s ability to prepare for future health challenges. 

“We need to be able to generate evidence in real time in response to emerging threats. And research institutions play a critical role in that,” she said. “The existence of research infrastructure was critical to really understanding Covid-19 and to developing tools to respond to it” — from therapeutics to testing to vaccines. 

Those threats include bird flu or H5N1, which has infected poultry and dairy livestock nationwide and sickened humans, primarily farm workers. The U.S. has also recently seen a surge in measles cases led by an outbreak in western Texas. Experts have linked the rise in measles to a decline in childhood vaccination rates. 

“There’s been some conversation around (bird flu) and its pandemic threat potential. And to some extent, I think that that’s the wrong question,” she said. “The question is not about just the pathogen and what its trajectory will be, but rather, how prepared we are to respond as a state in the absence of the policy response and federal infrastructure? How are we going to do this without the federal resources coming our way?”

She referenced newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has a long track record of anti-vaccine activism. Kennedy has recently recommended unproven health supplements to treat measles while casting doubts on the safety of the measles vaccine amid a growing outbreak. 

“There is a large political economy that’s fueled the rise of RFK and other extreme figures,” she said. 

Sosin said the “abdication” of health response at the federal level has highlighted how important state leadership will be going forward. “The state needs to prepare for the vacuum of federal leadership.”

Levine — who declined to be interviewed by VTDigger on the Covid anniversary, citing travel plans in the days prior to his departure from his role at the health department — shared similar concerns about the federal government to Sosin in an emailed statement. 

“The turbulence we are seeing in public health at the federal level only underscores the point that here in Vermont, we have to be willing to do what it takes to be good neighbors to each other and protect our communities,” Levine said via email. 

His top takeaway: Vermont, get vaccinated. Despite the state’s initial progress on the vaccine, uptake for Covid and flu shots have fallen in recent years.

“My hope is that what we are seeing in our vaccination rates is a temporary setback, and that it will not take another dire public health emergency to find out if we have learned the right lessons,” he wrote. 

Correction: An earlier version of this story was wrong about the current job title of a public health official with the Vermont Department of Health.

Read the story on VTDigger here: New technology, and mistrust, is legacy of Covid-19 for Vermont public health.

About 9% of Vermonters have received the updated Covid-19 vaccine so far this year, according to a new dashboard from the state Department of Health. 

That’s slightly higher than the 6% of Vermonters who had received the latest Covid vaccine at the same point in 2023, according to Meridith Plumpton, the department’s immunization program manager. 

She said via email the difference was likely because the vaccine became available in August — earlier than when it became available in mid-September 2023. By the end of the 2023-24 winter season, about 26% of Vermonters had gotten the updated Covid vaccine. 

That’s still far below the 80% who received the initial Covid vaccine in 2021, according to department data, and slightly lower than the 35% of Vermonters 5 and older who received the first updated Covid vaccine, the “bivalent” booster dose, in 2022. 

The department’s new dashboard also includes data on flu vaccine uptake. About 12% of Vermonters have received this year’s flu vaccine, about the same as this time last year, Plumpton said. 

For the first time, the department provided data on newly approved RSV vaccines. About 26% of adults 75 and older have gotten the RSV vaccine, the department said. Only 700 pregnant people, infants and young children have gotten the vaccine this year, but the department did not provide percentages for that category. 

Getting vaccinated 

Covid hospitalizations and deaths have ticked downward lately after rising in August and September, according to the latest department surveillance report. Still, the past three years have seen Covid and other respiratory illnesses surge in the winter months. 

Vaccines are “our best protection” against those seasonal diseases, Plumpton said. 

“(Covid) and Flu vaccines lessen the severity and intensity if you do get sick,” she wrote. “It is important that people realize the (Covid) and Flu vaccines are updated each year to target the currently circulating variants.”

Covid, flu and RSV vaccines are widely available at Vermont pharmacies. You can see a list of pharmacies that carry vaccinations in your area on this federal website or schedule directly through the websites for pharmacy chains like CVS, Walgreens or Kinney Drugs. Many primary care provider offices also provide vaccinations, according to the health department.  

In general, health insurers in Vermont must cover the cost of the Covid vaccine, and certain health care providers offer it at low cost to uninsured Vermonters through the state immunization program, according to the department. Uninsured people under the age of 65 can also get Covid and flu vaccines at their local health offices. The department suggests talking with your provider about getting the RSV vaccine. 

People who have recently caught Covid can consider delaying their Covid vaccine by up to three months, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More details on the Covid, flu and RSV vaccines are available on the health department website. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Less than 10% of Vermonters have been vaccinated for Covid-19 so far this year.

This commentary is by Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity.

The Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity is calling for the immediate reinstatement of the emergency shelter program. These past few days, our staff have been purchasing tents, sleeping bags and supplies for families with children being exited from the hotels. Some of the children have disabilities, including autism. Think about that.

We have become accustomed to adults being unsheltered. For example, we now provide services for up to 200 people per day at our Community Resource Center in Burlington. Unsheltered children are not new in our work, but the scale of the situation is. We have not, until now, experienced children losing housing by the dozens. We are not equipped to support all the people in need.

Everyone deserves shelter. The need is especially critical for people with disabilities, seniors and children. We know from well-established research that children who experience even short-term periods of homelessness are more likely to become homeless as adults and will suffer serious educational setbacks. We know what COVID did to educational delays. Imagine the impact of homelessness on Vermont’s youth.

If reinstating the hotel program is no longer possible due to a room shortage, then the state, including the Agency of Human Services and the Agency of Education, should establish temporary shelters and deploy state employees as we do during public emergencies. Alternatively, the state should hire temporary employees or contracted staff, including child development specialists, to operate the shelters. Nonprofit organizations serving these community members are already stretched to the limit. They can play an important role in supporting these shelters, but cannot respond to this crisis alone.  

CVOEO operates the statewide HOME Program, which provides rapid rehousing vouchers to unhoused families. We, along with our partners statewide, have housed close to 140 families over the past 18 months. That is good, but we have many more families waiting because there is simply not enough affordable housing. How can we fault people when there is not enough housing?

All homelessness is a tragedy and a failure of our moral and political will. Our children deserve better.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Paul Dragon: Reinstate the emergency shelter program.

The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and citizens who are making a difference. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify to hear more.

Are the kids all right?

This question is foremost on the mind of parents, educators, and young people themselves.

Students today are still grappling with the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic, during which their schools closed and their education continued alone — or in many cases, their education and development stalled. Significant Covid-related learning gaps continue to pose a challenge for many students.

As graduation and summer approaches, the Vermont Conversation wanted to hear from students in their own words about their lives, concerns and challenges. We spoke with four high students from around Vermont, all of whom volunteer with Up for Learning, a nonprofit that brings together youth and adults to transform education with a focus on equity and justice.

The student guests are: Auishma Pradhan, a junior at South Burlington High School who is a member of the Winooski Antiracism Steering Committee; Harmony Devoe, a freshman at Harwood Union High School, who was recently named Vermont’s first Youth Poet Laureate; Jacoby Soter, a sophomore at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans who is a student member of the Maple Run School Board; and Mea Ree Jan, a junior at Winooski High School and the Center for Technology at Essex who is also a member of the Winooski Antiracism Steering Committee.

The students made clear that the problems of the world do not stop at the school house. Failed school budgets, racism and Israel’s war in Gaza were top of mind for many of them.

Soter said the effects of Covid on learning “is honestly much bigger than the actual Covid crisis that was two years long. We’re going to be feeling this for the next 10 years.”

He said he sees a “disconnect between (students) that were that were able to have people in the house and help them with Covid learning and everyone else. …There are a few kids who are really thriving and excelling socially, emotionally and in their academic career, and then there is everyone else who is really far behind.”

Among the problems Soter sees are an increase in vaping and substance abuse that contribute to “behavioral problems inside school and many students not feeling safe around their peers because of those behavioral problems.”

Auishma Pradhan said that she is deeply concerned about and affected by Israel-Gaza war. “This is the type of education that should be taught in school where it’s very immediate and it’s happening right now.” She said that “students would want to know about” it. “It’s not okay.”

“We should be able to show support,” she added.

Mea Ree Jan agreed and said that she empathized with suffering Palestinians. She noted that her family “comes from a long history of ethnic cleansing from Myanmar.” She is now studying health care and hopes to work with a group like Doctors Without Borders. “I would like to be able to directly help.”

Several of the students attend schools that have had their budgets voted down multiple times. Soter said that people are protesting rising taxes by voting against school budgets but “it only affects students because people in Montpelier, they don’t take those no’s as negatively as the students do.”

Vermont Youth Poet Laureate Harmony Devoe read one of her poems. “It’s about being Asian and being proud of my heritage,” she explained. “I wrote it when there were a lot of Asian hate times in the news. And that just affected me mentally.”

Almond Eyes

By Harmony Belle Devoe

You are born
And into this life of
Almond eyes
Caramel skin
Dark chocolate hair
A trifle of color
You grow
And into this life of
Switching of tongue
Beads of phrases strung
“Where are you really from?”
You hear of gunshots
In the streets
Adzuki bean sweets
The surrenders and defeats
Bow down to the white man’s feet

They gave you your life
Now you pretend
You don’t feel the cuts of the knife
They colonize their Asian wives
Now we rise
They must do more than just apologize
Their wrongs will never be rights
We realize
We must fight for these rights

We descend
Like the gods
And we grow
Like the cherry tree
We dissent
We’re not robots
And we know
We cannot be controlled

We die
And from this life of
Almond eyes
Caramel skin
Darkest chocolate hair
We leave
Our legacy;
Be proud
Of your Asian heritage
We will build the bridge
You will tread it
Might have to mend it
Mentally
But eventually,
This will be
Our legacy

I stand in my Asian soul
Full
Of the foods and smells of the kitchen
Kare-kare
Scallions
Halo-halo
Perfume
Golden sun medallions
Sesame oil
We toil
Endlessly
Relentlessly
For the Western’s greed
Now
For equity, equality, and peace

I stand in my Asian soul
My head held high
My almond eyes

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Are the kids all right? Vermont high school students speak out..

In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, as workplaces closed down and the nation shifted toward social isolation, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a new high in the number of people moving into Vermont. 

Experts, policymakers and everyday Vermonters eyed the boom and wondered: Could this be the long-term antidote to Vermont’s aging and shrinking population? Or conversely, could it strain the state’s resources beyond what it is capable of handling?

Last month, the Census Bureau published its migration statistics for 2022. What the numbers show is that the second year of the pandemic marked a return to the more modest migration totals of the pre-pandemic years.

Among the early newcomers were Amy Allen and her family. Her late father-in-law lived in Maine, and she and her husband grew worried about him living alone after the onset of the pandemic. At one point, Allen’s husband drove 13 hours from the northern Virginia area to help his father after a health incident.

But they couldn’t convince him to come down to live with them. Instead, her family looked all across New England and settled on South Burlington as a combination of good schools, access to services and close proximity to an airport.

“Getting a New Englander out of New England is a hard thing,” she said. 

The people VTDigger recently spoke with who moved to Vermont in the early years of the pandemic came from a variety of backgrounds and moved to Vermont for a variety of reasons, sometimes for multiple reasons at once.

At a national level, wanting cheaper, newer or better housing was a top reason cited for moving places, according to the Census Bureau. Family- and employment-related reasons were also common.

According to the Census state-to-state migration flows, about 26,000 people moved into Vermont between 2021 and 2022, while 23,000 moved away. That’s a net migration gain of just under 3,000 people, compared with a net gain of more than 14,000 people the year before. 

The Vermont Office of the State Treasurer shared these figures recently, noting that the two years together marked a net population increase of around 17,500 — more than the previous decade combined. 

But experts also cautioned that the Census data is plagued by a high error margin, so high it could almost erase the 2021 to 2022 total. That’s because the data is based on the American Community Survey, which interviews only 7,000 or so Vermont households each year. The estimated number of people who have moved to Vermont in the past year — and from what state — is extrapolated from that sample to the whole population.

Peter Nelson, a geographer at Middlebury College, said that despite the high error margin, it still makes sense that pandemic-era trends affected 2021 to 2022 data. But a primary one, the willingness for employers to allow remote work, has since started to shift the other way, he said. 

“My casual observation, based on lived experience here, is that … the intensity of newcomers arriving in the area has slowed down a bit,” he said. “I think in part due to like, there’s no place for people that want to move here to live.”

Migrants from states near and far

Nelson added that the Census numbers also seem to align with other data sources on where people tend to come to Vermont from or to move to from Vermont. 

In 2021 and 2022, Vermont reportedly gained the most newcomers from states like New Jersey and Massachusetts, while losing residents to New Hampshire, some Southern states like Florida and a few Western states like Utah. 

Within the data, Nelson observed greater flows in and out of Vermont from its neighbors; places that have larger populations, like California; and states with established migration connections, like Florida, with its historic “snowbird” population.

Jen Beane-Edgar, originally from the coast of New Hampshire, came to Vermont in August 2020 to get out of what she called a toxic relationship that escalated during the early months of lockdown. She moved in with her parents in the Upper Valley region and was immediately impressed with the services available there.

“My youngest is profoundly autistic, and the resources that I’ve received here and the support for that are just amazing,” she said. 

Beane-Edgar loves the beauty of Vermont, the lack of congestion and the friendliness of her neighbors, although she conceded that Vermonters keep to themselves a bit more at first and slowly warm up to people.

Are newcomers adding to the income gap?

Nelson, the Middlebury geographer, said that while the overall number of migrants may be small, he’s concerned about what the influx signifies about Vermont’s affordability and equity. 

Data from 1040 tax forms, published by the Internal Revenue Services, shows that in 2021, people coming to Vermont had a higher per-capita income than people leaving. That’s a trend that’s been going on for years.

“I think the income gap between in-movers and out-movers leads to more acute economic inequalities amongst the population that’s here,” he said. 

That’s not always the case, though. Some pandemic-era migrants have had struggles of their own with the cost of living in Vermont. 

Steven Tanzi grew up in the Hudson Valley, went to the State University of New York at Plattsburgh across the lake from Vermont and took a job with the Radio Vermont Group after graduating. 

He said via email he originally thought he’d be able to “survive” here on his salary offer, but “after moving and entering the ‘real world’ for the first time fully, I quickly realized I simply did not make enough money.” 

He has worked a minimum of two jobs at a time to make ends meet. Housing costs are the main cause of his financial problems, he said. 

“Rental apartments are overly expensive, making finding a place to live that is in good shape extremely hard,” Tanzi wrote.

Not all migrants have stayed

It’s impossible to say from the Census data how many people who moved to Vermont in 2021 have since left the state since the bureau doesn’t track individuals. At least one person VTDigger reached out to came to Vermont during the pandemic but then had to leave. 

Linnea Paton and her partner live in Brooklyn, though she has long hoped to make the move up to Vermont. She loves hiking, swimming in lakes and having friends over at her home. 

“The things that make me happy are hard to do in Brooklyn,” she said. 

So during the pandemic, as their offices closed to in-person work, she said, “Why not now?”

The couple and their preschool-age child ended up staying in South Burlington for about a year and a half before their employers told them to come back. She has fond memories of specific hikes and places she found, like the Intervale in Burlington. 

“There’s no end to the number of lovely places to discover in Vermont,” Paton said. The experience has only cemented Paton’s desire to move back again, permanently.

That is what Allen and her family plan to do, even though her father-in-law died in June. 

“We were able to do everything possible for him those last couple of years, and that was totally worth it,” she said. 

Her children have thrived since the move and enjoy their new school and outdoors programs, Allen said. 

Allen’s advice to people who have just moved here? Join a community or hobby group as an easier way of meeting people. However, there have been a few difficulties adjusting to Vermont as a born and raised Texan, one that comes up specifically this time of year. 

“I thought I could scrape by with cute shoes, and you can’t do that in the winter here,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont gained far fewer people from migration in 2nd year of pandemic.

With many community (and home) kitchens damaged by floodwaters, Vermont has rebooted a recently sunsetted pandemic-era food distribution program in the wake of July’s catastrophic storms.

Vermont Everyone Eats, a program that paid restaurants $10 per ready-made meal for free distribution through local charities and food pantries, shut down this spring after nearly three years in operation when federal Covid aid dried up. But a new iteration of the program — called Vermont Emergency Eats — is now back in operation.

Nate Formalarie, the director of communications and strategic initiatives at the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said that, before the floods came, state officials had already been in discussions about how to reactivate the popular program in case of a crisis. Officials have since set aside $900,000 in state funds, he said — enough to pay for about 3,000 meals a day for a month.

“It being an emergency, it was just said: ‘Yes, let’s do this.’ I think as the dust settles, we’ll probably look to (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) to see if they would kick in some reimbursement on that,” he said. “But we wanted to get it going as quickly as possible.”

Restaurants that are paid to prepare the meals must be located in one of the nine counties included in the federal government’s major disaster declaration — that’s Caledonia, Chittenden, Lamoille, Orange, Orleans, Rutland, Washington, Windham and Windsor counties. People don’t necessarily need to live in those counties to receive the meals, but that’s where distribution hubs are located.

Amanda Witman, the program’s coordinator, said the first round of meals went out on Monday, and about two dozen restaurants are already participating. 

“​​It’s pretty exciting to be in a position of taking our long-term, pandemic-era model and adapting it on the fly to create an emergency program,” she said, adding that officials hope to create an enduring model that’ll be ready to be reactivated in the case of future crises.

The rebooted anti-hunger and economic development initiative comes amid widespread disruption of Vermont’s food system. Local farmers sustained major crop losses, downtown restaurants were devastated, and food pantries and churches that were serving vulnerable Vermonters in some cases themselves lost equipment — or entire kitchens.

The Montpelier Food Pantry, for example, which was operating out of the Trinity United Methodist Church basement in Montpelier, lost all of its equipment and inventory when the capital’s downtown core was inundated last month. And local churches that were cooking daily community meals, and serving a large population of people experiencing homelessness, also had major damage to their kitchens.

Jaime Bedard, the Montpelier Food Pantry’s executive director, proudly noted that, aside from the Tuesday immediately following the storm, the food pantry hasn’t missed a distribution day. (It’s currently operating out of a temporary location at the Center for Arts and Learning.) But with much less cold storage space available, she’s stocking less perishable food — and worried about finding a permanent and affordable space to eventually relocate to.

“I’m getting a little sticker shock when I’m looking at real estate here,” she said.

Statewide, meanwhile, the Vermont Foodbank is seeing what it calls “Covid levels” of ordering from its local partners, and notes that, during the pandemic, the food bank distributed higher volumes of food than any time in the organization’s history. In the month after the July floods, the nonprofit moved over 1.2 million pounds of food — a 45% increase from the prior month.

“It’s kind of a crisis on top of a crisis,” said John Sayles, CEO of the Vermont Foodbank.

In Cabot, Elizabeth Vitale, executive director of Neighbors in Action, which operates the local food shelf, said traffic at the nonprofit’s most recent weekly food share was actually roughly double what it was seeing at the height of the pandemic. She said she’s thrilled the pandemic-era program is back — and hopes it sticks around at least a little longer than the 30 days it’s been approved for.

There are plenty of practical reasons why ready-made meals fill an important need, Vitale said. Many of the food pantry’s clients are homeless, and have nowhere to cook. Elderly clients or those with disabilities can struggle to prepare a meal at home. And those impacted by the flood may be displaced, or even if they’re home, some of their appliances or utilities might still be offline because of storm-related damage. 

But Vitale said there are also more intangible ways in which hot, prepared foods bring comfort in times of stress.

“You know, when somebody’s sick, you bring them a meal, right?” she said. “And so it’s kind of like our state being like: ‘We care about you and your situation.’”

Read the story on VTDigger here: State launches ‘Vermont Emergency Eats’ to provide meals after the flooding.

Dr. Donald Berwick’s “Moral Determinants of Health” presents the fundamental tenets of sound health care policy.

It looks beyond health care infrastructure, such as providers, clinics and hospitals, when considering the variables that determine “health” by including conditions such place of birth and early childhood, education, employment, social circumstances of elders, community resilience (i.e., adequate transportation, housing, food systems, public safety, and a sense of community agency), and redistribution of extreme wealth and income to ensure social and economic security. 

These forces are what largely shape a person’s physical and mental health. Other analysts have added gun violence, loneliness, environmental toxins, and a dozen more variables.

I’ve always been surprised by how Berwick’s determinants apply with equal measure to education and the raising of our children. In an earlier column, I cataloged the many ways in which we’re letting our children down.

I’m also struck by the decision of many good health care and education providers to leave their professions, citing “moral injury” — understood as a psychological response to having to act or witness behaviors in one’s profession that are inconsistent with one’s values and moral beliefs, often imposed by a broken system. Or having to make decisions that affect the survival of others or where all options lead to a negative outcome.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress just published its annual report card on U.S. student performance in the 2022-23 school year and the results were discouraging, showing a 4-point decline in reading and 9-point decline in mathematics. It also compared these with the 2012-13 school year a decade earlier — well before Covid began in 2020. There’s a decade-long decline of 7 points in reading and 14 in math. 

This puts the lie to the contention of so many educators that the Covid pandemic is to blame. Since Covid, we’ve had a year with students back in the classroom and scores have continued to decline. Was Covid a factor? Unquestionably. Is it the defining factor? No.

There are three relevant areas of inquiry:

• the socioeconomic and environmental determinants mentioned above.
• the function, governance and culture in our schools.
• the integrity of our own parenting.

As to the first, if we correlate our “moral determinants of learning” with declines in educational performance, the effects are clear. The socioeconomic elements that determine whether a child has a secure enough sense of well-being that they arrive in school curious and eager to learn are evident — as opposed to being distracted by destabilizing social and economic conditions that demand their focus.

The child living in the back seat of his or her single mother’s car, eating whatever’s available, does not arrive at school ready to learn to read or to solve math problems, nor does the child of an alcoholic, drug-addicted, or incarcerated parent. Nor does the child in a physically or sexually abusive household. Although some manage to survive, a child subjected to any of these adverse childhood experiences is rarely in any condition to learn. Their pain is their priority, not learning.

Schools well behind the curve

We must also examine our educational institutions.

In the last three years, my wife and I have hosted two scholarship foreign exchange students from the Future Leaders Exchange Program funded largely by the U.S. State Department, One was from Moldova, often referred to as “the poorest country in Europe,” and the other from Serbia. Both of them attended our local high school, long considered one of the best in Vermont.

When the sad time came to leave us, after eight months as a member of our household, we had a lengthy discussion with each of them about their experience in the U.S., which for both was their first time outside Europe. In both cases, our students spoke glowingly of their experiences — the friends they’d made, the cultures they’d encountered, the new traditions and landscapes they’d experienced.

But there was one common disappointment. That was our school system, which they both found very disappointing when compared with the education they had had in their home countries.

Other than their American history course — and athletics — they felt they had learned little or nothing. They had already studied much of the math and science.

Our Serbian student arrived speaking three languages — her two native languages, Serbian and Russian, and she was also fluent in English. Our Moldovan student spoke her native Romanian and Russian and was likewise fluent in English and had taught herself Italian. They began studying our language in the first and fourth grades. By contrast, our local schools no longer have any foreign language requirement.

Beyond the disappointment in pedagogy and course work, their biggest complaint was about the classroom culture, which they described as chaotic and hostile to learning. Their descriptions were consistent.

Students who wanted to learn sat in a horseshoe around the teacher’s desk, students in the next rows back might be texting or watching movies on their cellphones with earbuds, while the kids in the back rows carried on open conversations, entirely ignoring the teacher.

Unable to imagine this, I spoke with the principal of the school after the school year ended. We had a long and earnest conversation. I had not come to complain but to better understand what was happening in his classrooms.

We listened carefully to one another, but I came away with an intrinsically different understanding about how classroom culture, teacher leadership, and basic discipline make or break a learning environment. I was disheartened.

In 1968, I graduated from UVM with a degree in romance languages, a wife and two young children, and began a frantic job search. I found a job teaching French in the newly opened Mount Abraham Union High School where I taught six classes a day of French and had my own home room.

It was made clear to me that I was responsible for maintaining order and a learning culture in my classes. I took that seriously and over my two-year teaching career never sent anyone to the principal’s office.

There doesn’t have to be a conflict between treating our children with the dignity and respect they deserve in a classroom setting while holding them accountable for mutual respect and having clear rules of civility and academic accountability, tempered with each teacher’s understanding of a child’s innate capacity to learn.

Can the student with a cellphone in their hands and earbuds in their ears be paying any real attention to the rich worlds of history, literature, or scientific discovery, or watch a lab experiment, or immerse themselves in the demands of geometry?

Children learn primarily by example 

Finally, there is the culture in the home and community. Our children will not be who we tell them to be. They will be who we are. Child psychologists know that children learn primarily by example and less so by rule-making. 

If parents hold their schools in high regard and support shared standards of discipline and accountability, then chances are their children will as well.

But if the child sits at home and listens to their parents run down the school for whatever reason — demanding removal of certain books from the school library, lobbying to eliminate courses they don’t personally approve of, complaining about property taxes they pay to fund public education, for example — their animus against their child’s school and classroom will likely take root in the child and the child will have implicit permission to come to school laden with a variety of disrespects.

Two years ago, a good friend and 30-year veteran of public education — then principal of one of our major and most respected school systems — called me to let me know he was leaving the municipal system. He said, “I’m no longer here as an educator. My office is overrun with young people in varying states of mental and behavioral stress and now I have parents in our hallways yelling about mask mandates, the courses we teach and demanding removal of books from our library. This is not education,” he said with great sadness.

And to add to the pressures on young people, according to The Washington Post, more than 360,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine tragedy in 1999.

As our homes and schools become the battlegrounds for our pathetic culture wars, should we be surprised that learning scores are in freefall?

We do not individually own our public schools; our communities do. They are there for our common good, the good of our children and of our democracy. 

Extremes of wealth and power and the outcomes they buy are weakening our system of self-rule, but one vital goal must be to keep our schools from becoming battlegrounds for our personal prejudices.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Bill Schubart: There’s a lot more to education than education.

With the end of the public health emergency on May 11, we are taking stock of our Covid-19 response, assessing the benefits that have been made permanent, and ending certain pandemic-specific policies. 

BlueCross BlueShield of Vermont will delay changes in our members’ coverage until July 1.

During the pandemic, BlueCross BlueShield of Vermont paid for Covid testing and medications, administering vaccines, and both inpatient and outpatient treatments from our members’ capital reserves. This reflects our promise to members that these funds exist for their protection in unforeseen circumstances. 

Now that the public health emergency is ending, and Covid-19 is becoming endemic, its treatment, testing and vaccinations will shift to a similar coverage model for that of any other respiratory virus. 

As a state, we have learned a tremendous amount about how to communicate remotely during the pandemic. One of the greatest transformations in health care access that came to the forefront during the pandemic is the widespread adoption of telemedicine. 

Prior to the pandemic, telehealth was rarely used by either providers or patients. Fewer than 1% of our members’ health care claims were from telehealth visits in 2019. Now, three years later, our members routinely access their providers via telehealth — video calls, telephone checkups, and electronic opinions from specialists. 

During the pandemic, we sought to quickly broaden access to telehealth services for members who were struggling with provider wait times. With the ending of the public health emergency, these services will still be available to our members, but as of July 1, members who use AmWell will have cost-share for their visits, as we work to normalize telehealth within the scope of all patient care. 

Covid-19 vaccines and tests became a regular topic of conversation in homes across the state during the pandemic. The support that our state government provided all of us was profound. Our clinical team worked side by side with the Vermont Department of Health at vaccination sites, and our regulatory, member, and provider services teams worked around the clock with a single-minded focus to implement hundreds of changes to ensure our members could receive the care they need. 

Implemented with our state partners was the elimination of cost-share for testing, vaccinations and Covid treatments. Vermont was lauded for its pandemic response, and Vermonters stepped up in record numbers, rolling up their sleeves to get vaccinated. As the pandemic becomes endemic and Covid-19 is now grouped among the dreaded winter viruses with flu, RSV and the inevitable stomach bug, the Covid-19 vaccine and testing in a provider’s office will continue to be covered as preventive care. Over-the-counter antigen tests will no longer be a covered benefit. 

Some oral Covid therapeutic medicines will be covered with member cost-share; others that, as of February, were moved to investigational status by the FDA will not be covered by the members’ health plan.

Our pharmacies offer a critical point of care, and we support a bill currently moving through the Vermont Legislature that will extend some pharmacist provisions around vaccinations and testing that were normalized during the pandemic. During the height of the pandemic, when Vermonters were encouraged to stay at home whenever possible, we supported a policy to allow early refills on prescriptions. Now that mail order and in-person has normalized, we advocated to return to a 30-day supply over our concerns about the impact of wasted prescriptions on our waterways and environment, as well as the cost impact to premiums of unused prescriptions. 

As the public health emergency ends and we reflect on how Vermonters have looked out for one another over these past three years, what is abundantly clear is how profoundly caring our neighbors are. We are proud to be a part of the fabric of Vermont.   

Read the story on VTDigger here: Dr. Tom Weigel: Public health emergency ends; what Blue Cross members can expect .

Last month, the Biden administration announced its plans to end the Covid public health emergency (and with it, no-cost access to vaccines, testing and treatment). But despite the prevailing narrative that the pandemic is over, we continue to witness the unfolding of a mass disabling event. This declaration will almost certainly move us from emergency back to disaster.  

We are repeatedly told by national and state leaders that this is progress. That we are back to normal. 

In reality, we have done nothing more than to rebrand “staggering levels of illness and death” as something that is both expected and welcomed — the human sacrifice that must be paid for society to participate in our collective ruse.  

The painting of this sanguine picture will continue to come at the highest cost to Vermonters who are older, disabled, BIPOC, or low income. Despite ongoing espoused commitments to addressing health equity and preventable disparities at the national and statewide levels, current policy response provides nothing more than vapid platitudes in the face of harm.

We’ve pivoted from the response stage of benign neglect, to embracing choices that openly drive and increase health disparities, belied by our tacit agreement to force people into seclusion, accept high levels of death for all — and especially for some — and mete out harms to adults and children alike. The weight of loneliness at this stage is crushing, even while needed self-protective behaviors are pathologized by broader society.

Though we’ve been told ad nauseam that we have all the tools we need to keep ourselves safe, the proclamations are a farce for those at high risk of injury. Vaccines, preventatives, testing, and treatment have dissipated with the rise of hyper-transmissible variants, indoor air quality goes ignored, and mask protections have been removed even from congregate care settings.

And we are consistently being told by health officials and media alike that our risk of catching or transmitting Covid is low, even while community transmission levels continue to be at all-time highs.

According to the Vermont Department of Health website, “health equity exists when all people have a fair and just opportunity to be healthy, especially those who have experienced socioeconomic disadvantage, historical injustice, and other avoidable systemic inequalities.”

Instead of a decrease in death and disability, we’ve arrived at a perverse plateau in which the burden has merely been shifted to those who are most vulnerable. 

As protections and mitigation strategies are ripped away from Vermonters, we are begging our leaders for support and just opportunities for health. 

What will it take for these cries to be acknowledged and heeded? 

What will it take for Vermont and Vermonters to care about health equity during an ongoing public health crisis?  

Public health is particularly skillful at the retrospective — pointing out what didn’t work in the past and pledging to do better in the future. But as we continue to journey through the eye of the pandemic storm, those who are most at risk don’t have this luxury of time and pontification.

Health equity can no longer be something that is solely examined in the rearview.  Instead, it must be something we actively and planfully drive toward in the here and now. Together.  

Read the story on VTDigger here: Kate Larose: We’ve rebranded ‘staggering levels of illness’ as normalcy.

Last month, I was asked to investigate “Why this governor doesn’t care about working-aged people?” And by governor, they meant Vermont Gov. Phil Scott. 

That was the question posed to me, verbatim. And while I had some initial thoughts in response to that question, I thought I’d crowdsource the answer among Vermonters instead. And so I took to social media and asked Vermonters to answer the question with me. 

If you want to see those responses, find me on Twitter at @Michael_Shank and look for this conversation in early October. I’m pulling directly from and excerpting those answers. Let’s begin, and count the ways that Phil Scott has illustrated that he does not care about working Vermonters.

• First up, and a common refrain from folks on Twitter in response to my crowdsourcing request: “Scott vetoed paid family leave.” I heard this from many folks. Why is this important? Well, you know, kids. And parents. And loved ones. And sickness. 

For us working folks, the ability to take paid leave to take care of a sick kid or a sick parent, without the prospect of losing a job or losing good standing with an employer, is essential. And Scott, by vetoing that freedom and ignoring that necessity, is saying he doesn’t care about your sick kid, your sick parent, your loved one, or, frankly, your employment. (And a pandemic has reminded us why this matters — lost income and all.) But this response was just one of many, many grievances across Vermont.

• Second up, and related to the point above, was Scott and his administration’s “ignoring Covid entirely and letting it rage through schools and communities, constantly pulling folks out of the workforce to care for the sick or be sick.” Another Vermonter called out the “education secretary who bungled Covid, putting even more pressure on working families without a coherent (and often late in the game) policy.” 

Again, for us working folks, Scott’s approach is perilous policy, and as we head into what’s already being called a “twindemic” — with a severe flu and Covid season predicted for this winter — Scott is putting too many Vermonters directly in harm’s way.

It’s also worth noting here that Scott’s Covid policy is an extension of his general approach to public schools — that is, he’s keen to dismantle them and has consistently undermined them, which subsequently worsens Vermont’s demographics problem (who will move to a Vermont community if they know the state is actively undercutting its public schools?).

• Third, and related to where we just left off: Scott has targeted our public servants at every turn. As one person noted, “He seems to have it out for all public service workers and state employees. For example, the pension and health care fights. He consistently undermines/underfunds meaningful state work — the very work for which he gets credit.” 

Another Vermonter captured it poignantly and personally: “I don’t know what public school workers ever did to get on his bad side, but he sure does seem to make life harder for us at every turn.” 

There’s a demoralization crisis among public servants. Burnout and quiet quitting are common, and they are leaving their positions because they’re under-resourced and under-supported. And it starts at the top, with a governor who has illustrated that public servants are not his priority.

• Fourth: Scott “vetoed democratically approved tenant protections during a housing crisis” and “ended tenant financial assistance abruptly when a third of Covid financial assistance went to businesses, not those working for business.”

Scott has made it clear that he is not on the side of working Vermonters who are struggling to stay in their homes, afford housing, and pay rent. And after abruptly ending a poorly managed federally funded housing assistance program, amid a large and growing crisis of housing affordability, Scott’s administration has indicated it has no short- or long-term plan to solve the crisis and even less compassion for the workforce bearing the brunt of it.

Again, going back to the demographics problem facing Vermont, how will we recruit and retain service workers when housing isn’t affordable? How will small businesses survive if their workforce can’t afford to live here?  

• Fifth: Scott has refused to tackle the hard work to slow global warming, which puts working Vermonters increasingly and directly in harm’s way. 

As one Vermonter quipped in response to Scott’s vetoing of the clean heat standard, for example: “Hey, I believe working age people would like to enjoy retirement by not sitting daily in the fifth circle of Hell.” 

Avoiding that fifth circle won’t be an easy option for retirees with a governor who fights substantive climate policies, which he’s done regionally by refusing to join the Transportation and Climate Initiative, and statewide by vetoing the Global Warming Solutions Act and more. Fifth circle is a likely future with this governor; Scott is short on solutions but long on vetoes.  

There are many more answers (again, see for yourself on social media). For example, Vermonters flagged that Scott doesn’t care about harm reduction or saving the lives of working Vermonters. If he did, he would’ve supported overdose prevention sites. In refusing to do so, the governor’s move is “out of line with all the science — both published and in the field.”

And there’s more. Vermonters kept listing the failures of the Scott administration:

– Scott’s “refusal to even consider new efforts on gun safety.”

– Scott’s “resistance to any reform of our tax system, which was badly in need of an overhaul 11 years ago.”  

– Scott’s “flipflopping on following science to pander to his party.”

– Scott’s “zero energy expended on pushing back about public dollars funding religious/private schools.”

– Scott’s “nothing to support or recognize marginalized communities.”

– Scott’s “meh” response to administration failures.

– Scott’s vetoing more than any governor in Vermont history.

The list goes on. It’s beyond clear that Scott is failing working-age Vermonters on all fronts and in all the ways mentioned here. It’s past time for a change. It’s time for a governor who cares about working Vermonters. That’s not Phil Scott. And it’s time for him to go. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Michael Shank: On social media, Vermonters pan Gov. Phil Scott.

Community means being there for each other, particularly when times are tough, and especially for the sake of our most vulnerable members. 

Community means being honest with each other, bringing experience and evidence to our conversations so that we can find a way forward together. 

I’ve been bringing up Covid with friends and acquaintances lately. After initial hesitancy to share their views, I’ve heard from plenty of people who are worried about the “you do you” spirit of our society’s current approach to Covid. I’m pleasantly surprised by the widespread silent yearning for a return to the principles of caring for each other that characterized Vermont’s pandemic response not too long ago. 

So let’s start talking about Covid again. 

No matter how tempting it is, and regardless of the overarching narrative of society in general, our local communities don’t have to pretend the pandemic is over. Risk continues to persist and will likely grow in the coming months, so we should renormalize thinking through personal and social exposure together. From family and social systems to schools and towns, we can create evidence-based plans to protect ourselves from Covid’s worst impacts. 

Because the worst impacts of Covid are severe. According to national data, an average of about 400 people per day have died in our country since the Omicron surge bottomed out in April. That’s nearly the equivalent death toll of a 9/11 attack every week. That’s 70,000 deaths in the last six months during a relatively quiet part of the pandemic. This is a death rate more than triple that of the worst flu seasons on record. 

This is not the flu and the pandemic is not over.

The game-changer for me is long Covid, which some experts are calling the greatest mass disabling event in human history. It is characterized by a wide range of potentially permanent symptoms across an array of bodily systems, including brain fog, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, persistent fatigue and depression. We are only beginning to understand its widespread impacts, but the emerging data is sobering: Up to four million American workers are out of the workforce due to long Covid, contributing to a national labor shortage. 

About 5% of Vermonters report ongoing long Covid symptoms — that’s over 30,000 people in our state who are currently suffering, three months or more after a Covid infection, with no way to know when or whether they will recover. Some of those people are fully vaccinated, previously healthy, and had asymptomatic cases. 

This is not the flu and long Covid may very well represent a secondary pandemic.

Schools are charged with caring for some of our most vulnerable and precious community members. Unfortunately, due to the minimalist approach recommended by Vermont’s education and health agencies, our schools are doing very little to protect students and staff. In stark contrast to just a few months ago, most schools in our state aren’t systematically collecting transmission data, enthusiastically encouraging vaccination, or proactively offering information or resources such as masks and tests. 

As a community, we should reassess whether dropping almost all mitigation measures makes sense. We do not have to follow the state’s lead on treating Covid-19 like a taboo subject. Quite the opposite, in fact. Within a broader context of denialism and misinformation, it is more important than ever for our local actions to be reasonable and realistic.

The reality is another wave is coming. And though Vermont’s approach was relatively robust in the early days of the pandemic, our state’s current recommendations for community protections are weaker than those of surrounding states and the federal government. 

Although it doesn’t go far enough in my personal opinion, the guidance for schools from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a reasonable moderate point of comparison to Vermont’s extreme approach. In addition to air quality measures and vaccinations, CDC asks schools to have a plan, tied to levels of transmission and outbreaks, for how and when to deploy measures such as testing and masking. 

This is common sense: we should temporarily use more tools during Covid waves in order to keep our schools open, minimize illness interruptions for students, guard against educator burnout, and decrease spread in our communities. 

I know that it is unpleasant to think about, but with the winter wave looming, it is time for us to figure out a better way forward. If you are skeptical of the severity of Covid, please consider the evidence about the ongoing social harms of the pandemic and the individual risks of long Covid. If you are aware but have relaxed your vigilance recently, take note of the impending winter wave and get a plan in place. And if you are worried about the pandemic and our society’s increasingly indifferent response to it, don’t give up hope on the possibility of a better local approach during this crucial moment.

I encourage everybody to engage their family, friends and neighbors to think about what a responsible middle ground between lockdowns and letting it rip might look like. And if you find others who want stronger consideration and action, as I have, then take your collective concerns to your school board and other government officials.

Those of you who are entrusted with formal authority of any kind, please do what you can in your sphere of influence to move us back toward a reasonable approach. Our communities deserve bold leadership now and for the tough times ahead to empower us to care for each other and center our most vulnerable members.

Ignoring Covid won’t make it go away. But together we can find the right balance between acceptable risk and caring for each other as a community. We owe it to our children, our schools, and ourselves.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Life LeGeros: Let’s talk about Covid mitigation in our schools.

“It ain’t over till it’s over.” —Yogi Berra

Vermont has found some powerful new tools to make Covid disappear. Since the very beginning of this pandemic, our health department and other leaders and authorities took bold steps to “slow the spread” of the virus. 

First we were told to stay home, stay safe, wash our hands, and keep our distance from others in public. Then we were told to mask up and limit travel and large gatherings. 

As testing and vaccination became available, these tools were pushed out across the state, with a strong emphasis on protecting the most vulnerable Vermonters — the elderly or disabled and those with underlying conditions, such as immune compromise. 

The success of these measures was impressive. Our health care resources were strained but never overwhelmed, as they were in other states and countries. Deep gratitude and appreciation is due to our leaders, health care workers, and all the other frontline workers who kept us moving forward under the threat of infection, serious disease and death.

Now we have entered a new era in our response to Covid. Covid still causes death or long-term disability for many Vermonters. It has caused many more to leave the workforce permanently. Businesses struggle to remain open in the face of supply chain disruptions, customer wariness, manpower shortages and burnout. 

For the foreseeable future, the “new normal” seems to involve rolling surges in Covid cases due to new variants of the virus, confusing public policy, changes in the weather, and even the kitchen sink. While the numbers of hospitalizations and deaths due to Covid have remained relatively low since the Omicron surge, they continue nonetheless as the elusive virus remains uncontained in the community.

To combat the chronic stress and impairment this situation has caused, Vermont has pulled out some powerful new tools to make Covid disappear.

We have stopped calling Covid a pandemic. Now it is endemic, or end-emic as some say. This makes it seem like a virus we can live with.

We are closing state-run vaccination and testing sites. This may make access to these important tools more difficult for disadvantaged citizens or those who live in remote areas. But the upside to these closures is the implication that things are now really getting better. It will also save money for the state, making it a real win-win for Vermont.

We have stopped those depressing daily reports of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. No one wants daily reminders of how devastating this disease continues to be. And we have stopped those dreary weekly Covid press conferences with Gov. Scott and the administration. Those good folks always tried to put a positive spin on the situation in Vermont, but that could only go on for so long.

We have loosened or removed Covid restrictions in our public schools. This restores freedom of choice for students and their families. Hopefully, it will also allow face-to-face (rather than mask-to-mask) engagement in the classroom, just like old times.

Indeed, these are powerful new tools. If they work, maybe things will finally be all right again. And if they don’t work, we can just continue our slow, spiraling descent into the maelstrom.

All of us are searching for some endpoint to all of this. And we continue to seek guidance and support from our experts and leaders to get us to our goal. Unfortunately, it is still unclear what that goal might be, and unclear how we might be able to achieve it. 

In that context, health policy decisions have been made that resulted in unintended consequences. Let’s focus on just one: the impact on Vermonters most vulnerable to serious disease and death from Covid, namely immune-compromised citizens and the elderly or disabled.

In the early days of the pandemic, protecting these vulnerable Vermonters was the top priority in implementing public health policies and procedures by the administration. Not so much anymore. In fact, it feels to many that Vermont has turned her back on them. 

And in fact, the clear message now is that they must fend for themselves. Right now, the distressing reality faced by these vulnerable Vermonters is that public policy no longer has their backs — instead, public policy has pushed them further into the shadows where they cannot be seen or heard. 

Not only must they continue to cope with all the old safety precautions imposed by Covid — masking, washing, distancing and avoiding — but now they must guard against the increased risk of exposure due to “opening up.” 

They need to take extra precautions. They need to ask family visitors if and when they have been tested for Covid, and, better, ask them to stay masked and/or outside in any case. They need to double-mask when they go grocery shopping (one mask for themselves, one for those other shoppers who are not adequately masked). For those with disabilities who are unable to mask themselves, all public spaces must remain off limits. 

They need to keep a personal stock of rapid antigen tests. These tests are not for their own use — if they test positive, it is already too late — but to make it a little more possible to engage directly with family and other potential visitors.

And for these vulnerable Vermonters, this situation has engendered a regrettable new level of distrust. Distrust of the experts and leaders and policy-makers who no longer have their backs. But also a new distrust of friends and family and even ordinary passersby who now unwittingly pose an increased risk for infecting them.

Maybe we are doing the right thing. Maybe these powerful new tools will take us in the right direction. Maybe unintended consequences are unavoidable.

Whatever the case, maybe a bit more fine-tuning of public health policy could be helpful. The recent changes in policy, especially those changes that place responsibility for Covid precautions on the individual, have led to considerable confusion and multiple interpretations. 

Given that state of confusion for the general public, it could be very useful to vulnerable Vermonters if the Department of Health could provide clear and thoughtful guidelines both for vulnerable individuals and the general population to help protect vulnerable Vermonters and perhaps even allow them to participate in the community again.

Read the story on VTDigger here: David McKay: Vermont has found new tools to make Covid disappear.

This year I led my churches through the holidays in Covid quarantine, it was one of the most terrifying, inconvenient and spiritually challenging periods of my life! 

Having now come out the other end of my quarantine, I find myself wishing I had received more direction in what to do. 

December is a busy month for ministers, and at the start of the month my wife woke me up to inform me our daughter had tested positive for Covid with an at-home test. After we confirmed that she was sick and that her symptoms were mild, we bunkered down to do the responsible thing and locked ourselves in the house for the good of society.

My wife and I had hoped we would only have to wait out our daughter’s quarantine to get back to life. Long story short, Covid did not care.

At the start of our quarantine, my family started looking for directions — and this is why I am writing, not to say there is any lack of direction, but to share I feel there is a serious lack of coordination and leadership in how we are facing this current wave of Covid.

As far as the state of Vermont is concerned, as long as I and my wife tested negative, we had the choice to quarantine for five days or go out into the world, business as usual. That did not feel safe to us, or to my congregations, I might add. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended isolation for 10 days after close contact and then getting tested five days after that. This seemed the safer approach, and so when my daughter got sick, we started a timer, and when my wife tested positive a week later, we reset that timer for her. 

My wife and I chose to listen to the CDC because we also were listening to religious directions. Organized religion is “supposed” to be about moral and civic responsibility — “Love thy neighbor” (Matthew:22) and such — and so, as we were deciding what to do, we shifted into “love thy neighbor” mode. At the start of the month, I felt I had a pretty good grasp on my family’s Covid problem. Again, Covid did not care.

What does being in Covid quarantine look like for a minister over the holidays? Well, for me it meant my holiday month was messed up. I had to do everything over zoom, even the Christmas Eve service. This I did from a laptop the congregation placed on top of the pulpit, making me look like a robot minister! 

This holiday season became a month of dashed expectations and creative adjustments. And while my congregations were very supportive of me in this situation, I was always wrestling with my own expectations of what a minister “should” be doing over the holidays. It did not feel right for me to be stuck at home when normally I would be leading worship. Also, ministers have a bad habit of ignoring when they are sick and doing their job anyway, just so you church folk out there know to look for that!

Needless to say, by the time my quarantine period was over I was ready to get back to work. This first Sunday of the new year was supposed to be my first Sunday back behind the pulpit. My family had recovered, and I seemed to be healthy. I had been keeping my congregations in the loop with my health too. I had taken an at-home Covid test and it was negative, I was fever-free, and I had promised that I would be at church in person.

But that morning, I woke up with a sore throat and shortness of breath. Having seen my wife go through it, I knew those were Covid symptoms. I found myself in a gray zone and I did not know what to do. 

This is where I lost direction. Having tested negative a day before with an at-home test, but still having symptoms, should I honor my promise to lead service in person, or should I stay home and stay safe?

For many reading this, the answer may seem obvious, and in reflection, it seems clear too, but I understand now more than ever how important directions can be when you are thrown through the wringer and don’t know what to do. In those moments, “obvious” is not clear, and the thing that saved me was communication. 

That morning at 3, when I knew I was unwell, I sent an email out to my churches and hoped my congregants would get back to me. While I waited and hoped for a response, I got ready for church, hopped into my car and drove off to work. 

By 7 a.m., I was at my first church and ready to go and it was then when a friend at the church gave me a call and gave me DIRECTION!  She told me to “Stay home and stay safe!” And that is what I did. It was a long drive back home, but I cannot express the amount of relief I felt when my congregants started to get in touch with me and shared what they needed me to do.

What I needed through my quarantine were clear directions. This is not something I received from the CDC or the state, which are taking a get-through-it-yourself approach to this wave of Covid. I feel this is wrong. If I did not have religious and community direction in how to address my quarantine, I feel I would have shown up in person at church that Sunday. 

I wound up testing negative for Covid. I had a common cold, but even so, I would have ignored the risk, thinking that I was doing the right thing by honoring my job commitment. I think about “essential workers” in hospitals, supermarkets and public schools, who suffer the same dilemmas with little or no guidance.

Getting through a pandemic is about coordination and communication. We need this from our government, not just the community. And I hope that the Scott administration and everyone in our state government will do more to increase the direction and communication we need to get through these topsy-turvy pandemic moments, and do the right thing for our neighbors here in Vermont.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Rev. Devon Thomas: When Covid came calling, I yearned for direction.

You are not protecting our children. 

Over the holidays,cases in kids age 0-9 nearly doubled from the week prior and cases in kids age 10-19 more than doubled, according to a report by WCAX.

The guidelines and tools offered to protect K-12 students are lackadaisical at best, and it’s even worse for those age 5 and under who are not able to be vaccinated and have also been excluded from state testing programs.

Now, after a chaotic first week of school after winter break with Covid case numbers soaring, forcing some schools to close, the state has announced it’ll be removing the few mitigation programs that were in place.

Contact tracing is to be stopped, as is surveillance testing. Rapid tests will be given only to those who are unvaccinated once they’ve been identified as a close contact and administration of those tests left to parents. No proof of a negative result required. 

Do we really think the parents who refuse to even wear masks are going to properly test their kids and then isolate as required? This can’t be the state’s best response to protecting our students and keeping schools open in the worst surge of Covid we’ve experienced.

We can do better. Much, much better.

Vaccinate

The state must go back to “following the science,” as the governor did in the first half of the pandemic, and take actions accordingly. 

First, we know that many vaccinated people are getting and spreading Covid, so it’s irrational to now exclude this group from school testing programs. We also know that frequent and proactive testing will catch cases soonest and can prevent days or even weeks of further spread. 

Second, the definition of “vaccination” must be changed to mean boosted once eligible. We now know that the efficacy of the original vaccine decreases to about 30% after six months and continues to wane, so without a booster you’re not protected and you’re not protecting others.

Third, mandates work and are used all the time to keep communities safe. Six vaccinations are currently required to attend preK-12 public schools in Vermont — diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, poliovirus (IPV), measles, mumps, rubella, varicella (chicken pox), tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, meningococcal acwy. These are required even though there is not an eminent threat of infection, like there is currently with Covid. 

Similarly, mandates about smoking also protect public health. No longer can you light up in a restaurant, airplane, etc. 

Simply put: You don’t have the right to put others’ health in jeopardy.

The state knows mandating Covid vaccines works to protect students. It’s why it did it for its public universities and state colleges. In fact, Castleton University, part of the Vermont State Colleges System, required all students to have boosters to qualify as “vaccinated” AND required and facilitated PCR testing for all students prior to the beginning of classes this spring semester.

So why not treat all public school students equally regardless of age? Why is there no requirement for vaccination in our public elementary, middle and high schools?

Gov. Phil Scott blames the 5% of Vermonters who remain unvaccinated for the current Covid surge. Well, it seems our student population is partially to blame, making up a significant portion of that group. 

Take the current vaccination rates in my school district’s elementary schools (Windsor Central):

• Woodstock Elementary: 35.7%

• Killington Elementary: 36%

• Barnard Academy: 41%

• Prosper Valley: 41%

• Reading Elementary: 50%

Of the 568 elementary students in the district (preK-6), 100 are in preK (which are not included in the above vaccination percentages — and would make them even lower if included).

The Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine was approved for kids ages 5-11 in October 2021 and was authorized for kids ages 12-15 in May 2021 — plenty of time for all who want it to be vaccinated by now. But the uptake has lagged.

So the state thinks handing over responsibility for public health to parents of these kids — who have chosen not to vaccinate their students — is the best way to detect Covid, mitigate exposure and spread?

At Woodstock Middle School/High School, the vaccination rate is around 80%, which is better, except that now only 20% of the the students will be eligible for any sort of testing! 

The state’s plan is one of willful ignorance. It’s reckless. It’s abandonment. 

If we want to see higher vaccination rates so that schools can remain open with less disruptions for students, teachers and parents, a mandate will get us there fast. It’s logical and equitable to make vaccination requirements apply equally to all public school students kindergarten through college (and preK, once eligible).

Ask yourself: how is it justified not to provide the same expectation for all Vermont students?

But Scott stops short of action, despite making vaccinations his main public health strategy against Covid.

It begs the question: Do we actually want to find cases and decrease the spread of Covid in schools?

If we did, actions would certainly look different!

Test to Attend

In addition to mandating vaccinations, the state should be doubling down on testing. Instead of removing current testing programs, the state should have announced an additional “Test to Attend” program where all students and staff (vaccinated and unvaccinated) had to show a negative rapid test result before attending class daily. If positive, they’d be given a PCR test to confirm and sent home to isolate for five days, per new state guidelines.

Knowing that students, teachers and staff were not currently contagious each day would be a huge relief for all and go a long way to preventing unnecessary infection. Ensuring a student’s health at public school is not something that should be left to an honor system. 

I’m sick of hearing what can’t be done. I’m sick of hearing excuses. Step up and start thinking about how it can be done! Think outside the box, if necessary, like we teach our students to do. If teachers and administrators are overwhelmed by the testing, then call for backup: Local police, fire departments, EMS personnel, nurses, trained parents could help. 

Figure out what will keep our students safe and schools open, then find a way to do it! That’s leadership. 

It’s been nearly two years that we’ve been navigating Covid-19. We know very well that vaccination (for those eligible) coupled with frequent testing (for all) helps to stop the spread of Covid-19. We no longer have to let the virus circulate in the classroom infecting students unnecessarily until someone gets sick enough to be tested, then wait days to receive their results. It’s not 2020; it’s 2022 and we have learned a lot. Let’s put that knowledge to use!

If we want life to go back to normal (and we all do) we have to get serious and use all the tools we have at our disposal. With record high Covid cases, and rising hospitalizations and deaths, the time to act has never been more urgent.

Mandating vaccinations (including boosters) to attend all public schools and mandating regular testing for all students (vaccinated and unvaccinated, as both can spread Covid) are tools we know work. They significantly minimize infection rates and the worst effects of Covid —which include not only severe illness but also the social, emotional and economic costs of missing school or work. Our hospitals are stressed and so is our economy.

It’s up to our elected leaders to do as much as each of them can to protect Vermonters, our schools and our economy from further damage. Or Covid will do the job itself — schools and businesses will continue to close due to illness and lack of staffing.

You have an opportunity to create a model not only for future outbreaks of Covid but for other diseases we’re likely to face in our lifetime. Will you? Or will you let political calculations of “popularity” or apathy render you immobile?

Stop with the excuses. You can and must do more — and soon.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Jim Haff: Vermont needs vaccination mandates and ‘Test to Attend’.

Recently I witnessed yet another conversation about Covid safety, where it was clear the unspoken question was: “What is our responsibility for the health and safety of others?”

I want to share this memory, because so many people in the conversation are younger and do not remember the times I am writing about.

The year I was in the sixth grade was also the year of one of the last rubella (German measles, three-day measles) epidemics. These epidemics came in waves every few years. As the nickname “three-day measles” suggests, rubella isn’t a serious illness for kids or adults. It’s on about the level of a cold -— you could catch it and not even know you’d had it (kind of the way some people nowadays talk about children getting Covid.)

But here’s the catch — unborn fetuses can contract rubella if their mothers aren’t immune, and the impact on the baby is catastrophic: Fetal demise, stillbirth, serious heart damage, blindness, deafness, intellectual disability. 

Every few years, there would be an epidemic, and cohorts of people ended up institutionalized — it is likely that some of them, now elders, still are — because of the disastrous multisystemic damage caused by rubella before birth. In a time when abortion was illegal in most of the U.S., rubella during pregnancy was one reason women were sometimes able to terminate a pregnancy.

That year was also the year I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. For reasons I can’t remember, this was very, very important to me, and I had the idea (not necessarily correct) you were supposed to take confirmation class in the sixth grade. A solitary kid with a complicated family and school life, I put a lot of energy into preparing for confirmation and memorizing the catechism. I looked forward to the solace of Holy Communion and a deeper connection to God, if not with the church community.

Except then the rubella epidemic happened. I come from a big family, and in that pre-vaccination era, we all had every childhood disease, one after another, except somehow we had all avoided rubella. And that meant, my mother said, that I might not be able to be confirmed, because of the very real risk that I could be coming down with rubella and spread it to one of the many pregnant women in our congregation in the course of the service.

This little individual story turned out OK. Somehow, over whatever the time frame was, my brothers and sister and I all caught rubella, got over it, became immune, and I was able to be confirmed without spreading illness to vulnerable people. A few years later, our whole family left the Episcopal Church and became Quakers.

But my point is simply that my mother’s position was unequivocal, and she was right: We don’t get to do things that put vulnerable people at risk, whether those vulnerable people are old or young or not yet born. 

That, too, became infused into my spirituality in that crucial time: We do not live (only) for ourselves, but for one another. There was just no question in her mind about this, and there is no question in my mind today.

The larger story also turned out OK, at least where rubella is concerned. Not long after that last epidemic, a vaccine became available, and now children are required to be vaccinated in order to attend public school, summer camp or live in college dorms. That’s why we vaccinate everyone possible against rubella, so that pregnant women don’t catch it and pass it along to their unborn babies. And that’s why we no longer have cohorts of catastrophically damaged children born in the months following a rubella epidemic.

Of course, you don’t have to let anyone put anything in your body that you don’t want there (quoting one of the people in the discussion referenced in the first paragraph). But in making that choice, you still have a profound responsibility to the people around you. 

If you’re not willing to be vaccinated, then you must not take part in social situations or community events where your choice could lead to someone else getting sick or dying. This is our obligation to one another as members of a community and of a society. 

Please listen to my mother. She knew what she was talking about.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Victoria Rhodin: Listen to my mother; she knew what she was talking about.

“There is hope everywhere,” concludes Suzanne Simard in a recent interview with “On Being” NPR host Krista Tippet. Simard is professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and her most recent book is “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.”

The interview shares some of her work recognizing the huge, connected ecosystems that our forests are — both above and, especially, below ground. 

Her optimism isn’t just some saccharine, Pollyanna-like greeting card phrase, though. She comes to it from years of dogged research. Research tempered by the harsh reality of doing that work, parenting her two children, all the while dealing with breast cancer. 

These most welcome words of hope come at a time when many of us are experiencing anything but hope. We’re tired. We’re frustrated at the on again-off again prevalence of Covid. At a lack of feeling that we are united in addressing Covid. Then, there’s the dark cloud of loss for loved ones Covid has taken, along with the loss of dependable routine in our lives and not feeling connected with each other. 

“We are hardwired for connectedness,” author and social worker Brene Brown shared in an interview in Forbes Magazine. “However, we’re not all feeling that connection right now. We’ve sorted ourselves into factions based on our politics and ideology. We’ve turned away from one another and toward blame and rage.“

Brown adds: “To the question, how did we get here? … My answer would be fear. … For when we ignore fear and deny vulnerability, fear grows and metastasizes. We move into blame and shame. We will do anything that gives us a sense of more certainty and give our power to anyone who can promise easy answers and give us an enemy to blame.” 

Contributing to the unease many are feeling is living in quickly changing times, amplified by Covid, climate and population diversification. 

Hurricanes and drought the nation experienced this summer give credence to the longtime predictions of climate scientists. The predictions were of storms more frequent and severe, but also wide swings in weather patterns that brought continued drought out West. And, here it is, just as predicted. The unease from these occurrences is compounded, as well, by concerns that we know what to do, but will we? 

Our changing population demographics may also be raising the anxiety level of some, and even harder to admit. The global majority of people of color are moving toward a national majority in the U.S., as we move deeper into this century. 

That’s raising a lot of fear and anger among the far right, and manifesting in an attempt to set up a system of governing without majority votes, just to hold on to power. Will the attempts to rig the process so majority votes won’t count, and create a South African-style apartheid government, work here? 

History shows it didn’t and won’t. Which is why a better strategy is treating everyone equally, with equal rights and opportunities, while seeking to right the wrongs of the past. 

As the Brene Brown quote above reminds, we can face our fears or look for someone to blame. Whether we try to look down on people of color, people from “away” such as refugees, people of a different religion such as our Jewish friends and neighbors, or people of a lesser economic standing — the Blame Game doesn’t work. 

The opportunity we have, then, is to embrace those coming to the U.S., our state and our towns. To see them as the infusion of new workers our businesses need and the infusion of diversity that science and nature tell us create the strongest ecosystems. 

Which all circles back to the starting words from Suzanne Simard and where she gets her optimism. Her research shows these strong ecosystems tend toward healing and regeneration. And, so can we. 

The ups and downs we’ll face far and near can be the catalysts for growth and bringing us together. Not unlike the efforts where I live in Putney, not that long ago. The two fires at our general store ultimately inspired resolve and collective effort to rebuild, moving beyond the initial fear and sadness at the loss of our community landmark. Rebuild we did, with the concerted efforts of many. 

Likewise, Vermont can lead the way and show the nation. 

Covid, climate, diversity. We‘ve got this. It’s hard work, yes. There’ll be bumps, bruises and maybe crashes, but we can create a smoother road to a better future, brighter opportunities for all, and prove Suzanne Simard right.

There IS hope everywhere.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Rep. Mike Mrowicki: Ups and downs can be catalysts for bringing us together.

With over 80% of Vermonters having received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and nearly 72% of us fully vaccinated, on June 15 the governor declared an end to the state of emergency and the termination of pandemic-related social restrictions. 

It is significant that Vermont is the first U.S. state to reach an 80% vaccinated rate. It is also significant that throughout the pandemic Vermont suffered only 24,339 known Covid infections and 256 total deaths; both our infection and mortality rate were the least in the nation compared to the 49 other states. 

And while even a single death is a regrettable tragedy, stacked against Alabama’s half a million-plus cases and 11,000-and-counting fatalities (600,000+ nationally), it’s clear that we fared better than most. And we have also emerged with the fifth-lowest unemployment rate in the nation at 2.9% (Texas by comparison is at 6.7% while Florida is at 4.8%).

How did we do this? Well, while much of the South and other parts of the country fretted about masks being an infringement of civil liberties and the vaccine being part of some insane conspiracy, most Vermonters from the get-go cared about their communities, abided by social distancing, wore masks (even before any mandates came into effect), and worked collaboratively in making our society resilient in the face of hardship.

When the lockdown went into effect in March 2020, the state started down a path that rapidly expanded access to unemployment benefits, imposed a moratorium on evictions, restricted utility shutoffs, organized free child care for essential workers, made sure that free meals were provided to all kids, guaranteed folks would be able to receive basic Covid-related health care, 10,000s of essential workers (including undocumented farm workers) received hazard pay, and even while restricting or halting indoor gatherings/business, Vermont loosened regulations on outdoor economic activities. 

These steps, combined with effective contact tracing and implementation of policy based on science — along with the federal paid sick leave, paid family medical leave, and increased unemployment benefits — went a long way in creating an environment whereby we were able to exponentially reduce the harm threatening our people. 

As president of the Vermont AFL-CIO, I am proud that our State Labor Council vocally supported these reasonable steps during those dark times.

But all the good policy in the world would not have mattered if our people did not care about each other, and if folks did not individually endeavor to keep their communities more safe by wearing a mask and abiding by social distancing recommendations. Point being, Vermonters gave a damn about each other, and by and large, together we did right by our communities.

This is not to say this was a utopian experience, and this is not to say that too many workers weren’t unduly put in harm’s way in certain towns and by certain employers and in certain industries. The truth is that many were. 

But in numerous cases, even where the employer failed to take proactive steps to keep workers safe, union stewards, like in the city of Newport, stepped up to implement their own health and safety protocols. And in countless other shops, union leaders sat down with (and at times pushed back against) management to make sure workers had adequate personal protective equipment and that everything possible was done to keep people healthy. 

But that, of course, was in shops that have a union. The situation was much more dire in select places of employment and towns where there is no union and where the bosses refused to accommodate the health concerns of workers. 

And while there are certainly harrowing tales to be told about the irresponsible actions of some employers, the story as a whole is one where we, as a people, did well. And our expanded social safety net managed to keep our communities intact despite it all.

But here is the thing: Without further action, the steps taken to strengthen the social safety net during the pandemic are fleeting. Of the many temporary social benefits that were put in place, the only lasting legacies (so far) will be universal mail-in voting for general elections, and an almost insulting $25 extra a week in unemployment benefits for having a dependent child. 

And conversely, as the pandemic subsides, those workers who received livable wages through hazard pay will fall back into economic insecurity. Evictions and homelessness will again rise. Mandatory paid sick days will fall back to their pre-Covid rates. Paid family medical leave shall remain an aspiration. Utilities will be shut off. Health care, for other deadly diseases, will remain a privilege and not a right. Child care will remain unaffordable for many. Child hunger will return as the free meals wind down. And unorganized workers will still face an unfair and uphill battle when they seek to form a union.

Even so, the pandemic has shown us two things. 

First, Vermonters do stand together when facing a perceived crisis. At our core, we care about each other. 

And second, when there is a sense of urgency, when we can hear the wolf knocking at our front door, it is both possible and desirable to rapidly build a social safety net capable of delivering security to our communities and working families. 

And if we can do it in a matter of days, weeks and months during a state of emergency, we can do it every day, for everyone, everywhere.

Let us not lose sight of the fact that for low-income people, for the sick, for those who live paycheck to paycheck, the wolf was already at the door long before Covid-19. And as we have just seen, it does not have to be this way..

So while we rightly celebrate the coming out of the darkness that was the coronacrisis, let us also demand a continuous progression forward toward the common good. Let us require a future whereby the core benefits provided during the pandemic (livable wages, expanded unemployment, access to health care, increased paid sick leave, paid family medical leave, free child care, free meals for every child) become permanently woven into our social fabric. 

And let us go a step further, not only creating a more fair and democratic path by which workers can form a labor union (i.e. card check), but let us also reinvigorate our economy through public investment in infrastructure, affordable housing, retrofitting existing homes, and building renewable energy plants (all with union labor). In other words, it’s time for us to embrace a new social contract and a Green New Deal.

Read the story on VTDigger here: David Van Deusen: We took care of people during Covid; how about now?.

While Gov. Phil Scott lifted statewide Covid-19 restrictions in Vermont this week, the state Department of Corrections is taking a slower approach.

Scott announced Monday he was lifting the restrictions because 80% of eligible Vermonters had been vaccinated. 

The corrections department is also easing up on some of its restrictions but not all the way back to where they were before the coronavirus struck in March 2020.

“We want to make sure everybody is safe when we do this,” Al Cormier, chief of operations for the corrections department, said Wednesday. “We’re taking it slow. We’re going to have a methodical approach to how we open up.”

That includes requiring that incarcerated Vermonters be vaccinated before they are permitted in-person visits, which have not been allowed since the pandemic began 15 months ago, Cormier said.

Stacy Hubbell, whose husband, Travis Hubbell, is incarcerated at Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, said Wednesday that the corrections department is not lifting restrictions far or fast enough.

She said her husband is not vaccinated and does not plan on getting vaccinated. As a result, Hubbell said, she won’t be able to visit him.

“Personally, I think that’s bull. It’s forcing inmates to get the vaccination if they want to have visitors,” Hubbell said of the upcoming policy. “That means no matter what, until they change that directive, I will no longer be able to visit my husband.”

Through the pandemic, she has visited with her husband via video. One free 25-minute video visit is allowed per week. Additional video visits require a fee, she said.

She said the quality of the video is quite poor.

“You can’t see his facial features, and the same goes with us — if we move too much, he can’t see us. It pixelates,” Hubbell said. “It’s a tiny tablet, so we’re essentially quite small.”

Hubbell said she expects her husband to file a grievance over the visitation policy. 

Cormier said the corrections department worked with the state Department of Health in developing the guidelines for visitations, trying to find the best way to do it.  

The corrections department aims to allow in-person visits starting July 1, he said, and hopes to permit people to come into the facility for programming and volunteer services, such as parenting classes and religious services, beginning Aug. 1.

The corrections department will allow vaccinated and unvaccinated visitors to come into a facility for in-person visits, Cormier said. Those who are not vaccinated against Covid-19 will be required to wear a mask, he said. 

Corrections staff will ask visitors upon entry about their vaccination status, Cormier said. 

He said Wednesday he did not have exact figures on how many incarcerated individuals are vaccinated but estimated it at 70%. On Wednesday, the total population in Vermont prisons was 1,275 individuals, including 154 people housed out-of-state in a Mississippi prison, according to the department’s website. 

In early May, the corrections department reported 34% of people in prison had refused vaccination; 810 had received the shot and 421 had declined. That meant 66% of incarcerated individuals had been vaccinated at that time.  

Cormier said the department has been encouraging people in prison to get vaccinated.

First, he said, the department surveyed those who refused to get vaccinated, asking why. 

Some incarcerated Vermonters have told VTDigger that they refused vaccination over a distrust of the corrections department and a need for more information than had been provided. 

Last week, Cormier said, the department released a video — featuring James Baker, interim corrections commissioner; Mark Levine, Vermont’s health commissioner; and Vermont Public Defender Matthew Valerio — answering questions and concerns that had been raised.

Any incarcerated person who changes their mind will have access to the vaccine, Cormier said.

Once programs and volunteer services resume on a target date of Aug. 1, Cormier said, those who are unvaccinated will be required to wear masks.

Inside the facility, he said, incarcerated individuals and staff must continue to wear masks. About 80% of the corrections officers have been vaccinated, according to Cormier and a corrections status report distributed last month. 

Cormier said new protocols that he hopes will go into effect next week will no longer require vaccinated incarcerated individuals and staff to wear masks.

Tim Burgess, a Vermont resident who is with U.S. Prison Watch, advocates for incarcerated individuals and their families. He said Wednesday allowing visitation for some people in prison and not others was a bad idea.  

“I think it should be universal. Either you can visit or you can’t visit,” he said Wednesday. “The potential there is causing an uproar among the inmates.”

He said he encourages all incarcerated individuals to get vaccinated. As for the corrections department’s pace in lifting restrictions, Burgess said he understands the need not to move too fast.

“Corrections is dealing with people in very close quarters,” he said. “It can be a tougher situation with corrections than with a town.” 

Valerio, Vermont’s public defender — whose department includes the state prisoners’ rights office — said Wednesday he’s glad visitations will soon be allowed and other restrictions are slowly being lifted. 

He said he understands the need for the corrections department to take a little time to lift its restrictions.

“It’s not like flipping a switch,” he said. 

Valerio said he thinks it’s appropriate at this time to limit in-person visitation to vaccinated incarcerated individuals to prevent a Covid-19 outbreak in a prison.

“Those are the kind of facilities that can cause huge problems,” he said. He said he’s been urging incarcerated individuals to get vaccinated for a long time: “This is one of those things I’ve been pretty clear on.”

He also said it’s important for people in prison to have connections outside the prison walls, and isolation can take a toll on a person’s mental health.

During the pandemic, one person died by suicide while quarantining at Northeast Correctional Complex in St. Johnsbury, and another attempted suicide quarantined at Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport. 

Valerio said Wednesday that vaccination has been key in helping to resolve a lot of the impacts that Covid-19 has had on the state’s correctional system. 

“To be honest, vaccination was the way out,” he said. “That is the way you solve your problems with isolation, programming and visitation, and all that.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In-person prison visitations set to resume, but not everyone is happy with the rollout.

Several readers wrote to us this week to express confusion when the VTDigger Covid-19 tracker — fed by Vermont Department of Health numbers — showed a vaccination rate of 80.09%, above Gov. Phil Scott’s goal for reopening the state.

At the same time, Gov. Scott was tweeting a separate figure: 79.6%, with 2,093 people to go before Vermont hits that target. 

After yesterday’s numbers, we still have about 2,000 more to go to hit 80%.

We need a strong push heading into this weekend.

Find a free, walk-in clinic today at https://t.co/KaYvmsLE56. No appointment needed! #OurShotVT pic.twitter.com/fnp5NtAOtD

— Governor Phil Scott (@GovPhilScott) June 10, 2021

What gives?

Reporting on large population data with this degree of precision is complicated. Two thousand Vermonters is only 0.3% of the state population, so the smallest discrepancies between different data sources can throw off the fine-tuned system the health department had in place.

Since December, the health department has reported vaccine numbers through its dashboard, which breaks down doses by age, county and race, among other factors. As of Thursday, June 10, it reports that 441,245 people had received at least one dose of the vaccine. 

Until May, the dashboard also reported the percentage of eligible Vermonters who had started vaccination. That data included all state-run vaccination clinics, along with federal pharmacy partners. It did not include vaccines administered by Veterans Affairs or the Department of Defense.

On May 20, the dashboard switched to a new system: the percentage of vaccinated Vermonters reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which “includes some data not reported to the Vermont Department of Health,” according to the health department website. 

The @healthvermont has added new data to its dashboard to put % vaxed in context. About 3/4 of VTers 12+ have received a dose, or 2/3 of the whole pop. https://t.co/Gx6c9W1x1d pic.twitter.com/yM5Uh16Fe8

— Erin Petenko (@EPetenko) May 20, 2021

The next day, Scott announced his intentions to drop Covid restrictions when 80% of the eligible population is vaccinated. 

Over that weekend, Scott tweeted graphics that showed Vermont’s progress toward that goal, but it became clear to his team that the numbers weren’t adding up. On May 25, he said at a press conference that he was walking back those percentages.

“We decided to proactively reach out to the CDC to ensure the accuracy of the CDC vaccination numbers,” said Michael Smith, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Human Services. “We did find duplicate reporting in one batch of Veterans Affairs numbers reported late last week and in a limited number of independent pharmacies.”

About 15,000 duplicates were in the data, Smith said.

Smith said the state would remove Veterans Affairs numbers in its reporting to the CDC in the future, and in the meantime the Scott administration would report its own numbers, adjusted for that issue.

It’s unclear what progress has been made on fixing the data processing since that time. On June 1, Smith said the CDC had removed 6,900 duplicate records, but 8,800 duplicates remained.

Meanwhile, the health department dashboard now has a blank spot where its percentages used to be, referring people to the Vermont Forward Plan website. As of Thursday, the site was slightly behind Scott’s tweet, claiming there are 2,385 people to go rather than 2,093. 

The raw data behind the dashboard still included vaccination numbers, which VTDigger used to power its own tracker. When readers pointed out the discrepancy, we removed the figures and are now using the Vermont Forward Plan data.

Read the story on VTDigger here: How Vermont’s magic number got buried by data discrepancies.

For nearly 15 months, Gov. Phil Scott has led Vermont through the Covid-19 crisis, relying on immense executive powers granted through the declaration of a state of emergency.

Since March 13, 2020, Vermont’s emergency status has served as a vehicle for Scott to implement drastic measures aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus — limiting Vermonters’ travel, shutting down in-person business operations, directing residents to quarantine and issuing a statewide mask mandate. 

Over time, the governor has rolled back restrictions, slowly reopening the state. 

But as virus cases plummet in Vermont, and the vast majority of residents have been vaccinated, the Scott administration is preparing to lift the remaining Covid-19 measures and the state of emergency that has made them possible. 

Scott said Tuesday that he plans on dropping his declaration “within days” of when 80% of Vermonters receive at least their first Covid-19 vaccine. As of Tuesday, 79.4% of residents had met the vaccination requirement, with 3,139 more residents needed to reach the governor’s threshold. 

In removing the emergency declaration, Scott will be giving up the wide latitude he and his administration have used to unilaterally respond to the pandemic.

Jared Carter, a constitutional law professor at Vermont Law School, said that by declaring a state of emergency, Scott — and governors across the U.S. — “have been able to essentially govern by fiat.”

Carter said that under state constitutions, governors can usually use such expansive power only “when there is an emergency” and the approach is “very inconsistent with the way things normally work.”  

“One of the things we can feel good about in Vermont, and hopefully across the country, is that when that emergency no longer exists, our leaders willingly give that power up,” he said. 

Living without a state of emergency

If Covid-19 cases began to climb again, and Scott wanted to reintroduce sweeping public health measures, he would need to redeclare a state of emergency. 

However, Scott’s legal counsel, Jaye Pershing Johnson, said if there was a resurgence of Covid-19, she doesn’t believe the same broad public health restrictions would be needed — given that state officials understand how the virus spreads and that most of the population is vaccinated. 

“Any approach that we do would not be a statewide ‘stay home. Stay safe.’ It would be something much more surgical,” Johnson said. 

Under state law, Vermont’s health commissioner, Mark Levine, also has broad authority to issue emergency health orders to mitigate “imminent and substantial significant public health risk.”

But Johnson said there’s a “general feeling” that the health department’s orders cannot be issued as broadly as the governor’s and couldn’t be applied across the state or to all Vermont businesses. 

“Generally, they’ve taken the position that they’re not going to use that power for broad application,” Johnson said of the health department.

Former Vermont Health Commissioner Harry Chen said Scott’s emergency measures “were great because they were necessary in such a kind of urgent crisis, where everything had to be aligned.” 

But as coronavirus cases drop, he believes Vermonters will follow the state’s health guidelines voluntarily, without the need for further orders. 

“We’ve all been through this. We knew what happened and the toll it took. So I think everyone will work very hard to keep us out of it again,” Chen said. 

“Certainly the governor can reinstate [an emergency order], but I don’t think anybody wants that,” he said. 

As Scott prepares to lift the state of emergency, he is also contemplating an executive order to continue certain pandemic response efforts — such as emergency food distribution and initiatives to house vulnerable Vermonters. 

During the pandemic, those initiatives have relied on funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Scott administration officials are concerned that, without an executive order, the state could lose its ability to receive federal dollars. 

Scott’s emergency powers face little scrutiny

Unlike other states, where legislatures and governors have dueled over the use of executive power during the pandemic, Scott’s emergency response has faced little pushback. 

Throughout 2021, lawmakers in 45 states have proposed legislation aimed at providing oversight of governors’ use of Covid-19 executive powers. Vermont is not one of them, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In March, New York lawmakers moved to strip Gov. Andrew Cuomo of some of his pandemic authority. And there are still bills pending in Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire that would limit governors’ executive powers.

In Vermont, Democratic leaders in the Statehouse have supported the Republican governor’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“I think we have been very fortunate to have the opportunity to have support, for the most part, from the Legislature. And when we needed them to step up and take Covid-related measures, they did,” Johnson said. 

Scott’s emergency declaration, and the state’s Covid-19 response, have received a handful of legal challenges, but none have yet succeeded. 

A former Newport UPS franchise owner fought the state in court after he refused to comply with the mask mandate. He has argued that the mandate is unconstitutional, but so far he has failed to prevail in court. 

In September, a judge threw out a lawsuit brought by a Rutland gym owner who argued the state violated the Vermont Constitution when it closed down his gym as part of the Covid-19 response.

In December, a group of eight Vermonters sought an injunction against Scott’s state of emergency, arguing it had gone too far. In their complaint, filed in federal court, they argued “the state’s actions are based on false and misleading data, incorrect science, and flawed testing methods, and are unconstitutional.” 

“Never in American history has a state so completely disregarded the constitutional rights of citizens to this extent,” the complaint said. 

On May 20, U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions III dismissed the lawsuit.

Johnson said it will be “very difficult” to argue Scott’s emergency measures have been unconstitutional. 

“We always took steps that were methodical and limited and time-limited,” Johnson said. “I think that’s evidenced by the chronology of the emergency order: It shut everything down fast. It opened everything up slowly, and as soon as the data supported the measures, we took them.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: What will happen when Scott lifts Vermont’s Covid-19 state of emergency?.

The future's looking good for most Vermont communities on the verge of a full reopening, Department of Health data shows.

More than 100 Vermont communities are in the lowest case bracket — less than one case per 10,000 people in two weeks. 

By contrast, only three are in the highest bracket of more than 80 recent cases per 100,000: Brunswick, Westfield and Whiting. Considering that each is small, with isolated pockets of cases, they could be as much a quirk of the data as a sign of a real surge in their communities.

Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, reported only five cases in the past week, one of the lowest weekly totals since the fall. Some towns had bigger case growth: Bennington reported 20 new cases and Rutland City reported 34. Still, those cases were not enough to put those cities in a high case bracket.

Officials have attributed Vermont’s recent track record with the virus to its high vaccination rate. Gov. Phil Scott plans to lift Covid-19 restrictions when 80% of Vermonters 12 and older have received at least one dose. More than 77% of eligible Vermonters were vaccinated as of May 26, according to the state’s Vermont Forward webpage. The next update is scheduled for Wednesday. 

Check out the table above to search for cases in your community and see how they’ve changed, or see the Department of Health map to compare it to your community’s population.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Low town-by-town totals on the eve of rescinding Covid-19 restrictions.

Vermont reported only two communities in the highest category of Covid-19 case rates in the past two weeks, the fewest communities in that category since at least December.

Those two communities were Lunenberg in Essex County, with 17 cases in the past two weeks,  and West Haven in Rutland County, with eight cases in the past two weeks. That placed them in the highest category of case spread, with more than 80 cases per 100,000 people.

Vermont as a whole has falling virus numbers. The state’s seven-day case average is 58, the lowest average since mid-November, Vermont Department of Health data shows. 

At the same time, vaccinations continue to rise throughout the state. Addison County has the highest vaccination rate, with roughly 73% of people 16 and older in the county getting at least one dose of the vaccine, followed by Chittenden County.

Essex and Caledonia counties have the lowest rates in the state. At 49%, Essex County is the only county where less than half of the eligible population has gotten the shot. 

Check out the table above to see how cases have changed in your community recently, or see the Department of Health map to see how cases compare to your community’s population.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s town-by-town data drops to new lows.

Vermont is now first in the nation in its Covid-19 vaccination rate, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

About 340,000 residents, or 62% of the population, have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to last week’s data from the Vermont Department of Health. About 44% of Vermonters have received both doses. 

The state overtook Connecticut for first place in the U.S. within the past week. 

Gov. Phil Scott heralded the announcement on Twitter on Monday. “We’ve been a national leader throughout the pandemic, and it’s up to all of us to finish strong,” he wrote, urging Vermonters to sign up for their shots. 

The ranking is based on total doses administered — including first and second doses. By that count, Vermont has offered 580,000 shots since December, a rate of 93,100 per 100,000 people, according to the CDC.

Meanwhile, supply appears to have outstripped demand. Many of the state’s sites have open slots, and inoculation rates have slowed. The state has opened up vaccination to part-time residents, including college students from other states and people who work in Vermont but live across the border. 

The Department of Health will now have to focus its efforts on reaching people hesitant to get the vaccine or who face barriers to getting a dose, such as Vermonters experiencing homelessness or those in the Northeast Kingdom, where uptake has been lower. 

Infection rates have also plummeted, down 39% from April 1, Mike Pieciak, commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation, said last week. Deaths and hospitalizations related to the virus have also declined. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont ranks 1st nationally in Covid-19 vaccination rate.

The state has proposed phasing out the motel emergency housing that has provided shelter to thousands of Vermonters during the pandemic. 

As of July 1, about 700 people — mostly single adults without disabilities — will no longer be eligible for the motel rooms that have been available since the start of the pandemic. They’ll receive about $1,500 per household to help pay for shelter. 

The plan outlined by a state working group would be the first step in reducing reliance on motel rooms for Vermonters experiencing homelessness, a move that critics worry could leave people out on the street. State officials say it’s a necessary step to wind down a program that’s untenable to maintain in the long run.

“We’re moving from a crisis response to something much more sustainable for the long term,” said Geoffrey Pippenger, senior adviser to the commissioner for the Vermont Department for Children and Families. 

Rep. Mary Hooper, D-Montpelier, chair of the House Committee on Appropriations, praised the proposal, adding that it will be a “monumental challenge” to help Vermonters move out of motel rooms after the pandemic. 

Under the proposal, which was submitted to the Legislature on Monday, the state would tighten restrictions for its motel rooms in June and require motel guests to reapply the following month for their slots. 

As of July 1, about a third of the 2,000 or so people in motels will no longer be eligible for a room. Those who the state considers vulnerable — families with kids, people over 60, individuals with disabilities and people fleeing from domestic violence or abuse — can apply for temporary, 84-day motel extensions, DCF commissioner Sean Brown said. 

Families could continue to seek additional 30-day extensions if they can show they are seeking housing and working with a case manager. 

Those who stay in motels would be expected to contribute 30% of their net income toward the cost of the rooms, Brown said, testifying Tuesday before the House Appropriations Committee. The state now pays an average of $97 a night per room and has used federal aid to foot the bill — more than $50 million — during the first year of the pandemic. 

According to the plan, the state would return to its pre-Covid-19 emergency housing rules by June 1, 2022. 

As Vermonters experiencing homelessness move out of a motel, the state will provide each household with about $1,500 to help pay for new housing. Brown said he expects some people will be able to move in with friends or family. About 150 shelter beds will open up around the state this summer, as well. Others may be able to find housing, he said. 

Likely, some people will end up on the street, though “our goal is as very few as possible,” Brown said. 

He said the state plans to create about 5,500 new apartments as part of a separate affordable housing effort. About half of those homes would be set aside for people coming out of homelessness.

Vermont Legal Aid attorney Jessica Radbord, who served on the working group and agreed to the plan, criticized the stipulation that a family that violated motel rules could lose housing for 90 days.

“Leaving people with nothing for 90 days, especially when they fall into one of those vulnerable categories, seems a bit punitive,” she said. 

In early July, the state will also end the mass feeding programs that delivered food to motels across the state. Brown said he expects other social service programs will open up, though “we recognize that food insecurity will still be an issue for some people in motels,” he said.

Not permanent housing

The plan marks a phaseout of the state’s most generous housing initiative ever. 

When Covid-19 hit in March 2020, state officials opened up eligibility to nearly any Vermonter who needed housing. The total number of people housed in motels around the state rose steadily during the winter. Now, Vermonters occupy 1,938 rooms — filled by about 2,300 adults and 413 children, Brown said.

The motels ensured that Vermonters experiencing homelessness could quarantine and provided a buffer against the economic losses inflicted by the pandemic. But those living in the motels also reported fearing for their safety, with widespread drug use and frequent police calls. Some residents were unable to cook fresh food without kitchens in their motel rooms, and the lingering uncertainty of the program left them unable to plan for their futures.

“It was never intended to be permanent housing,” Brown said in an interview. “Living in a motel room for a year is incredibly challenging.” 

[Related: ‘The best motel in Rutland’: Three days in Vermont’s emergency housing program]

Although the program was funded by the federal government, it was also pricey. A year of funding cost roughly $50 million. 

The program in the next year will cost about $40 million, including $30 million for the motel rooms, $4 million in case management and other services, and additional cash for state staffing, motel security and the direct payments to people moving into other housing.

As the state reopens, motels are gradually decreasing the number of rooms available to Vermonters experiencing homelessness and prioritizing rooms for tourists. Brown estimated that, by next winter, about 650 motel rooms would be available for the program, down from about 2,000 that are currently occupied.

Last month, the Legislature assigned the working group of state officials, housing providers and advocates to come up with a transition plan by April 30. An initial proposal from the state drew backlash from housing providers and advocates. 

On Tuesday, lawmakers praised the result, expressing optimism that it would reduce homelessness in the long term and provide a more sustainable system to help Vermonters find and keep housing. Legislators will have to approve the funding for the plan when they adopt the state budget in May. 

The new proposal is “light years ahead of what the state used to provide,” said Rep. Dave Yacovone, D-Morrisville. 

Others encouraged state officials to think creatively about how to make progress on addressing homelessness — rather than reverting to the pre-pandemic norm. 

“The notion we’re going back to the way it was, we can’t think that way,” Hooper said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Proposal would phase out Vermont’s homeless motel program starting in June.

As the Vermont Legislature hones its state budget proposal for next year, it is opting for a slower approach to spending the $1 billion the state is expected to receive in Covid-19 relief — bucking Republican Gov. Phil Scott.

With just weeks left in the legislative session, lawmakers are still deciding how they want to direct federal aid from the American Rescue Plan Act, a Covid-19 relief package President Joe Biden signed into law in March. 

Scott is pushing the Legislature to adopt a $1 billion plan that would include major investments in broadband, climate change, economic development, affordable housing and other sectors over the next several years. But when it comes to spending the federal windfall, lawmakers want to take a different path. 

Given that the state has more than three years to decide how the federal money will be spent, they say there’s no need to hastily allocate all of it in the coming weeks. 

“We know that we need to do careful work around this, and our unwillingness to fully embrace his plan is not obstinance, and it is not a political battle,” Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham, said in an interview last week.

“We have a responsibility to make sure we’re spending the money the best way we think honors what each of our communities need,” she said.

The Senate Committee on Appropriations voted out a state budget bill on Monday that would allocate about half of the American Rescue Plan Act money, or $478.5 million. The plan is to leave the roughly $500 million that remains to be doled out during the 2022 legislative session. 

In total, Vermont entities are expected to receive $2.7 billion in American Rescue Plan Act funding, but much of will flow directly to recipients, such as K-12 schools, colleges, municipalities and individuals. Lawmakers and the governor will have flexibility to determine how roughly $1 billion of the funding is spent.

Balint said that senators broadly agree with how the Scott administration wants to allocate the federal funds, and their plan for using it looks quite similar to the governor’s. Democrats have noted they share spending priorities with Scott — including goals to invest in broadband, affordable housing and efforts to fight climate change. But legislators favor allocating a smaller portion of it this year and directing more of it to workforce development and education.

The Senate’s budget proposal would harness $100 million of the federal funds for broadband expansion, $115 million for water and sewer projects, and $31 million for “climate action investments,” including $18 million for weatherization initiatives.  

Scott pitched his $1 billion spending proposal in April, a month after the federal government approved the funds and after the House had already passed its version of the budget, with a plan to spend $650 million of the American Rescue Plan Act dollars. 

House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, said the governor’s proposal came too late to get a thorough vetting in the Legislature.

“That’s why we’re saying, ‘Let’s work on the areas where we have common ground, and then let’s take time to look at these other ideas and proposals so that we get it right,’” Krowinski said.

The speaker said the state did not need “to rush with getting all of these funds out the door.” 

Krowinski also pointed to congressional consideration of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package, which could send Vermont yet another round of federal aid for major projects. Even more federal money on the table might change policymakers’ thinking about how American Rescue Plan Act funds should be spent.

“If we don’t have time pressures on this, and we know another relief bill is coming, I think we just need to be really thoughtful about that,” Krowinski said. 

Earlier this month, in a letter to lawmakers about a separate state Covid-19 relief bill, Scott said he believed American Rescue Plan Act funds should be allocated in a single piece of legislation “in a truly strategic and fully transparent way.” He criticized lawmakers for using the new money — instead of state dollars or other federal resources — to partially fund that package. 

The governor said the funds should only be used for “tangible infrastructure that provide the greatest economic benefits and will truly transform our economy.”

Over the next four years, Scott’s $1 billion plan would spend $249 million on affordable housing projects, $143 million on economic development, and $170 on water and sewer projects. It would also reserve $250 for “connectivity initiatives,” including broadband expansion, and $200 million on efforts to address climate change.  

During a press conference last week, Scott reiterated that he’s “opposed to utilizing the money other than for infrastructure” and wouldn’t rule out vetoing a budget if he disagreed with its use of federal money. 

“If you look back over the last four years, if I feel strongly about a situation, and the budget is not something that I agree with, I wouldn’t hesitate to veto if it was something I thought was detrimental to Vermonters,” Scott said. 

Democrats have criticized Scott’s plan for lacking “human” investments — spending on the mental health system, workforce development and higher education. 

Speaking to members of the Senate Democratic caucus on Tuesday, Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, who chairs the Senate Committee on Appropriations, said the governor’s proposal didn’t include money for Vermont’s workforce or help the state’s court system fully reopen as the pandemic subsides.  

The Senate’s budget includes more than $16 million to help the justice system respond to the Covid-19 crisis. 

In total, the Senate’s proposal would use $23 million for workforce development initiatives, including $5 million for scholarships for state college students preparing for “critical occupation careers” such as bookkeeping, graphic design, web design and small business management. 

It would also reserve $3 million to help adult learners in the state college system to finish degrees. 

Unlike Scott’s proposals for using American Rescue Plan Act funds, the Senate’s budget would also direct $53 million in federal dollars toward the higher education system, which has been strained by the pandemic. 

This includes $21 million for the Vermont state college system to address pandemic-related deficits and $20 million to invest in “system transformation” over the next four years. The University of Vermont would receive $2.2 million “to offset the impact from level room and board fees.”

The Senate budget proposal would spend $56.5 million of the American Rescue Plan Act funds on economic development, including $20 million for another round of grants to businesses that have weathered losses during the pandemic. 

And it would rely on $18.5 million of the federal funds for housing costs. The largest chunk of this funding, $12 million, would be used to help the state expand its shelter capacity, as Vermonters experiencing homelessness leave the hotels and motels where they’ve stayed throughout the pandemic.

The spending bill would dedicate an additional $40 million in state money to help build affordable housing throughout the state.

Balint said that the back and forth between the Legislature and the administration over how to spend the federal funds is the “usual dance” between the two branches. 

“What is getting lost is that we have a responsibility, when we hold the purse strings, to spend the money in the best way that we see fit,” Balint said. 

“So to adopt his plan, at this point, without doing due diligence in our committees, would be malfeasance,” she said. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Lawmakers buck Scott on plan to spend federal Covid-19 relief.

For many Vermont camps, last year was a lost summer. No swim lessons or rock climbing. No making beeswax candles or friendship bracelets. No impromptu jam sessions before meals. 

There were no campfires, either, and camp directors were in the dark. “It felt like we only knew how much we didn’t know,” said Frances McLaughlin, executive director of Farm & Wilderness, a Plymouth-based organization that runs sleepaway camps, day camps and a family camp. 

This year, camps are more optimistic. With the help of updated guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Saturday and mandatory guidelines released by the state on Friday, Vermont’s summer camps finally have a roadmap to return. McLaughlin said campers are in for a “special edition” summer. 

“Camp is still gonna be awesome,” McLaughlin said. “Yes, it’ll be different, and it can still be an amazing time.”

How different? It depends on the camp and the activity, but the CDC guidelines place an emphasis on the layered approach Americans have grown accustomed to: masks, distancing and vaccinations.

Masks are recommended whenever campers aren’t eating, drinking or swimming, and distancing of at least 6 feet is encouraged even while outdoors. The CDC also recommends that camps set up “cohorts,” or small groups of campers, to limit possible transmission. 

Vermont mandates that a camper arriving at an overnight camp will have to show proof of a negative test before arriving. At Farm & Wilderness, they will then be placed into a “pod” with the rest of their cabin, and campers will take another test about seven days after their arrival. At that point, cabin groups can start to do some activities with each other. 

“We know how to prevent Covid from emerging in a community setting, so we’re taking the steps that have proved effective in other places,” McLaughlin said.  

Vaccinations are now open to all Vermonters older than 16, but the federal Food and Drug Administration has yet to authorize the use of any Covid-19 vaccine for those under that age. Although children have been less likely to develop serious cases of Covid-19, the CDC said, they can still be infected and spread the virus to others.  

Pfizer and Moderna began clinical trials for those under 16 in late March, and Johnson & Johnson expanded its trials to include adolescents 12-17 in early April. Results are expected to be published by the summer, but most overnight campers will likely have packed up their trunks before shots are made available. 

So they have emphasized other strategies. McLaughlin hopes the overnight camps will function as closed communities, meaning some restrictions for camp staff. Employees are typically free to leave camp on their days and nights off but will have to stay nearby this summer. 

“It’s definitely a hardship on some level, but they understand why we’re doing this,” McLaughlin said, adding that returning staffers are excited just to be heading back.  

Masks will be required when indoors, in accordance with the Vermont Forward plan. Campers will be routinely screened for symptoms and will follow isolation guidelines put forward by the state Department of Health. 

The extra safety protocols don’t seem to have made a dent in enthusiasm for this year’s camping season. Farm & Wilderness expects to welcome more than 700 individual campers this year, up from about 500 in 2019, in part thanks to a stronger online presence necessitated by the pandemic. 

Lotus Lake Camp, a family-owned day camp in Williamstown, experienced a similar uptick in demand after closing last summer  — the first time in the camp’s 70-year history. Lotus Lake opened registration Feb. 15. By Feb. 16, it was booked through the summer, Director and co-owner Beth Watson Allen said.

Part of that is a result of reduced capacity. Lotus Lake set a 90-camper per-week cap, down from 160 or more in a typical year. The camp has suspended its half-day programs for 4- and 5-year-olds, and there won’t be the usual horseback riding or gymnastics programs, either. 

Campers will still rotate through different activity stations — making crafts, music or going on hikes — with their 10- to 18-camper pods. 

“We are all committed to making sure that our behavior during those times is really low risk because nobody wants to bring Covid into camp,” Allen said. 

As a day camp, Lotus Lake cannot operate as a closed environment the way overnight camps can. That means more restrictions for campers and staff in some areas, and more vigilance on the part of campers and families when off-site.  

While overnight campers are advised to practice low-risk behavior in the two weeks before arriving, day campers will need to maintain those practices throughout their time enrolled. 

McLaughlin said that campwide silent meetings on the grounds of Farm & Wilderness, which was founded on Quaker values, will have to be more spread out than usual. 

But after a year off, she’s eager to welcome campers back. 

“We know camp, and just being outside, can be a real balm for young people and for all of us,” McLaughlin said. “They’re gonna have just a pretty amazing time.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: New CDC guidance gives Vermont summer camps direction.