HANCOCK COUNTY — There’s a growing feeling in people’s guts, according to the leader of the county’s board of commissioners, that the national COVID-19 guidance getting passed down from experts should be done away with in favor of a more localized approach.
John Jessup, president of the Hancock County Commissioners, shared his thoughts on the subject as Mt. Vernon’s school board indicated its intention to stick with its original sources of direction Monday night.
“We all pick our own experts,” Jessup said, including the current U.S. president and presidents before him choosing Dr. Anthony Fauci, an immunologist serving as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to the president. Fauci supports practices like masking, quarantining and vaccinating in the fight against COVID-19, as do the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Indiana Health Department; the Hancock County Health Department; and Hancock Regional Hospital.
“When Dr. Fauci stands up on TV and feeds us all these lines of bull that we’ve been hearing for 18 months, we get that feeling in our gut,” Jessup said at the school board meeting. “It’s a spiritual thing; you feel it in your gut — something ain’t right here. Something ain’t right about what we’re doing to our children. Something ain’t right about what we’re doing to our economy…”
He added he didn’t have that feeling when Dr. Dan Stock, a Noblesville-based functional medicine physician, spoke at Mt. Vernon’s board meeting earlier this month about what he described as the futility of masking, quarantining and vaccinating against the novel coronavirus.
“And I’m not defending him or saying his studies are better than others, but I didn’t have that feeling in my gut,” Jessup continued, adding he felt Stock made sense and raised issues he had been wondering about.
It’s not that he feels federal and state guidance shouldn’t be considered, Jessup told the Daily Reporter after the meeting, but that he wishes to choose local experts he knows and trusts, and that he feels many others in the community do, too.
“All these people, including myself, love the community,” he said. “We love Hancock County, and even though we’re going to make mistakes from time to time, our mistakes are going to have less of a negative impact than the mistakes that are going to be made by people in Indianapolis, people in Washington, that don’t love our community.”
He didn’t provide specific examples of what he feels are Fauci’s failings, but that he feels the practices the doctor has advocated throughout the pandemic have lacked consistency.
“I feel like over time he’s lost a lot of credibility in a lot of people’s minds,” Jessup said, reiterating that much of the state and federal directives have created feelings in people’s guts that the guidance isn’t right and doesn’t make sense. “But they’re the experts. We just have to go along with this stuff and do it, even though there’s something telling us this doesn’t make the most sense in the world.”
