LA County Health Mocked for Promoting COVID Tests for Pets, Changes Designation of Social Media Accounts – Opinion

Sunday proved to be another great day for LADPH and Barbara Ferrer (its embattled director), as they promoted COVID testing for animals. Meanwhile, they continued to avoid transparency by changing their social media forums from places where the public could comment to being for “informational Objectives” only.

As I reported two weeks ago, LADPH had already cut off the ability to comment on their social media accounts in early August, but it’s interesting that they are now issuing a public statement formally changing the purposeThese accounts are:

Tweet from them:

This account is now for informational purposes only and, for that reason, public comments are limited to live ‘town hall’ type events it conducts wherein it solicits questions from the public during the live event. The Department will close any live events that have been concluded. Others posts remain closed for public comment

“Shutting off public comments seems like a great way to further erode public trust,” Bill Melugin of Fox News tweeted. Those Facebook, Twitter and Instagram comment sections are where many of the underground moms Jennifer O’Connell wrote about connected with each other, so I’m not sure that’s a coincidence.

While it was unusual for the department to cut off comments, dropping this bizarre tweet on Sunday morning at 2 AM is even more strange. This is why they would do it. It could have something to do with the Alliance of LA County Parents lawsuit that claimed doing this in a public venue violated the First Amendment. “To the cause, I’ll be adding my voice. @LACountyParents Appeal based upon the 9th Circ. decision. @lapublichealth is violating our First Amendment rights,” said attorney Julie Hamill on August 5. Together with others, they now investigate whether the department believes that changing the name of the forums will allow them to avoid accountability.

LADPH may have other reasons to close off comments though, as they weren’t done embarrassing themselves–because the day before, they’d tweeted out a widely ridiculed pronouncement about Test your pet for COVID:

The tax dollars are at work Daily Mail Reports:

So far, there have been 177 animal tests, some of which include popular domestic pets, such as cats, dogs and hamsters.

LA County has also taken to swabbing bats, rats, opossums, sea lions and squirrels – but none have tested positive for COVID.

The publicly-funded body says it is offering the animal testing to ‘learn more about the significance of COVID-19 in human, animal, and environmental relationships.’

There is no clear indication of what treatment will be given to animals who test positive. LA County stated that COVID symptoms are similar to human suffering.

Since LADPH has cut off commenting on their social media, people have naturally found other ways to lampoon Ferrer’s folly. This twitter threadYou can find many more gems in this category: 

My personal favourite, the parody LA Public Health posters such as this one.

We’ve extensively chronicled the travails of Ferrer and her department, but she just keeps giving us more. Although I had emailed Ferrer asking about their website redesign, they haven’t responded. To be fair, it is Sunday night, and they’re probably too busy testing pets for COVID.

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