The former Tennessee health official who was fired for promoting coronavirus vaccines received a dog muzzle from an anonymous sender as a veiled threat in the days before she was fired for efforts to get children vaccinated, CNN reports.
The week before she was fired, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, a pediatrician who served as Tennessee’s medical director of vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization, received a package containing a dog muzzle. The shipping slip contained no message and it did not identify the purchaser. Fiscus called Amazon to find out who sent it, but the company declined to identify the buyer. Fiscus reported the delivery to the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security.
“At first, I thought that was a joke and contacted a few friends, and then, when no one claimed it, I realized that that was something that was sent to me as some kind of a message,” Fiscus told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. She said she told her husband, “They obviously didn’t know me because they sent me a size three which is for beagles and I’m obviously a pit bull, which requires a size six.”
Fiscus caused consternation with Tennessee Republicans in the legislature by citing state laws regarding the ability of children to get the vaccine without parental consent. Having been contacted by doctors and health professionals around the state, Fiscus consulted with Health Department officials and cited the state’s “mature minor doctrine,” which allows doctors to administer treatment to minors if the assess the patient to be mature enough to understand the potential consequences of a treatment to consent to the procedure.
The policy has been in place for 34 years, was public facing on the Tennessee Department of Health website and was blessed by the governor’s office, she said.
Tennessee Republicans, however, objected to the use of the decades-old policy, claiming that the vaccine was too dangerous for minors to be able to consent. (Health professionals state that the various vaccines are exceptionally safe.) Fiscus was fired Monday.