He was the head of the Board of Health and works out of the UT medical center. He has been instrumental in local healthcare policy for the last several years. The real damage that was done when the Board of Health was destroyed by Glenn Jacobs and Kyle Ward was that our public health intellectual braintrust, the people that understood public health and health policy, were taken out of the decision making process. Jacobs pretended it was about "freedom", it wasn't. The Board of Health approved the Health Department budget every year. Jacobs wanrted that control and he got those two hacks Kyle Ward and Jason Zachary to provide the legislative backdrop to steal what little power the Board of Health had from them. We went from having one of the best covid responses in the nation, to one of the worst in the world following his policies. Glenn Jacobs public health policy comes at a cost of thousands of lives and it will take our local medical industry years to recover once he is gtone. Jacobs has literally dumped a billion dollar problem on our County that someone is going to have to pay for or fix, all to advance his political career at the expense of Knox County citizens.

The interesting thing about our Board of Health is that it disproportionately staffed by experts out of the UT system, a braintrust that would have cost millions to bring in to oversee our healthcare infrastructure, yet, those folks worked for free for the good of the community. The Haslam's taking the bull by the horns and making this move within the UT system was brilliant and a great example of good people can do with money when putting the needs of the community before personal gain. I am proud to be a part of a community that could produce a leader like Bill Haslam, just as I'm disgusted that we have turned into a place that would elect a two bit, self serving punk like Glenn Jacobs to office.

I don't know where they got the time to begin with, though, after almost four years of covering Covid on an almost daily basis, I can tell you that knowledge tends to be cumulative and many of the issues addressed by this expansion have been jumping out at us for years. Remember this, we typically have a pandemic threat from novel viruses and bacteria and fungus/molds every five years or so. Most don't pan out as particularly dangerous, but that was before we were dealing with cross-infections with covid. While it's still the covid that kills, cross infections are appearing to be a factor in deaths. Again, this is a big deal. We've never had to plan for infectious disease outbreaks at anywhere near the scale we do now. It's great to see ethical government officials continue to act for the good of the community, even after being kicked out of government by local tyrants.

Yep. Think of all the Tennessee towns that need healthcare help and have no rich benefactors.