BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Santa Clara County Public Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody, who issued the nation’s first lockdown orders during the pandemic, is writing a memoir.
Cody, 61, of Palo Alto, went on unpaid leave in September 2023 so she could participate in a fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Cody quietly returned to her department in Santa Clara County in June. Deputy Officer Dr. Sara Rodman covered for her during the fellowship, a county representative said yesterday.
Cody’s memoir will explore her “decision-making under great uncertainty; what enabled her to act quickly; the role of governmental structure; the impacts of her decisions; and the forces at play during a chaotic time in public health and history,” according to the Stanford Report.
A release date and book title weren’t available yesterday.
“I wanted to tell the story of what happened because the pandemic, in large part, was fought county by county and there’s over 3,000 counties across the United States,” Cody told the Stanford Report. “It was this absurd patchwork, and a local story is an important one to be told.”
Cody issued an order prohibiting gatherings greater than 1,000 people on March 9, 2020. Days later, she issued another order prohibiting gatherings of more than 100 people and restricting gatherings of more than 35.
“I was just thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Cody told the Stanford Report. “That means no weddings, no funerals, no celebrations, nothing. This has such a profound effect on people’s ability to live their life, but this is going to prevent more deaths.”
On March 16, Cody and six other Bay Area health officers announced a stay-at-home order that was eventually superseded by the state’s edicts.
Santa Clara County fined nearly 400 businesses totaling about $5 million for breaking the county’s rules — “a far higher rate” than neighboring counties, a consultant found.
Highest death rate
Santa Clara County also had the highest Covid-related death rate per capita in the nine-county Bay Area.
A total of 1,901 of Santa Clara County residents died due to the virus through November 2021, according to state records, or 96.6 deaths per 100,000 residents.
Cody became the target of protests, including outside her house, and a pair of sheriff’s deputies were assigned to her protection.
At one press conference, Cody told people to avoid touching their eyes, nose or mouth, but as she held a thick stack of papers, she unconsciously licked her finger to turn the pages.
One of her kids soon told her that she was the number one meme on TikTok, Cody told the Stanford Report.
Cody has a degree in human biology from Stanford, and her husband works at Stanford as a professor.
About the fellowship
Her fellowship started in September 2023. The research center sits in the hills above Stanford, where an estimated 2,000 books have been conceived, started or finished.
Cody was one of 36 people in the year-long program. Fellows spend their days planning, researching, writing and discussing their projects. They are required to go to lunch three to four days a week and attend weekly seminars, according to a program description.
Cody said the fellowship allowed her to slow down from her fast-paced job, which involves a lot of management and politics.
“There’s really not much time for reflection and contemplation and reading and any deep thinking about anything,” Cody told the Stanford Report.
Blend of studies
Cody said she sees public health as a blend between medicine and social sciences, but public health officials often focus more on medicine. Her fellowship has shifted her perspective.
“This has been an incredibly, incredibly rich environment for me to think about my recent work responding to the pandemic,” Cody said.
For example, Cody said she was struggling with questions about democracy and the authority that she used as health officer. So she met with a visiting historian who gave her a whole reading list on the issue.
The proceeds of the book should be distributed among people who lost their businesses and jobs during the lockdown. The county ought to have a law to prohibit employees from profiting from their public jobs.
The title of the book is: I Was A Dismal Failure, Having No Idea What I Was Doing.
I 110% agree with Disgusted.
She was one of the reasons why I pulled my family from the State after 5-generations.
Is that covid death count of hers from before or after she publicly in July 2022 eliminated at least 22% of her County death count for asymtomatic “with” covid cases per a “positive” test. Each such death triggered aprox. $30K in fed bonus cash to the County of Santa Clara whose budget is 50% health care costs running two public hospitals. Also in July 2022, the same month of her fessing up a death “with” covid like a stage 4 cancer death after a car crash with an asymptomaitc “positive” covid test is not the same as”from: covid, the FDA revoked via a quiet US Federal Register notice the Emergency Use Authorization for most all those PCR tests, but effective til December 31, 2022 for consumers to be able to use up those badly faulty test kits.
Santa Clara county had a special form for doctors on their website (which they memory holed now) reporting a covid death where the requirement was that the diseased tested positive EVER. NOT even deaths certificates! So, somebody who tested positive 2 years ago and died of unrelated causes becomes officially a “covid death” in the stats… Unsurprisingly, a giant spike of “covid deaths” was in nursing homes in winter 2020-2021 following the rollout of the injections. It was all on the county website, not conspiracy theories.
Here’s a title for her book: I couldn’t stop Covid but I managed to kill thousands of small businesses.
IMO Cody will never grasp the damage she created with the very extended SAH SIP orders.
She violated civil rights and many businesses, Churches, and Santa Clara county residents struggled to make sense of it all. In her feeble attempt to save lives, many lives were ruined and never the same. At the time county CEO James Williams tried to call the loan on Calvary Christian Fellowship. Yep, they went nuts enough to keep Churches from gathering, and that church with hundreds “voluntarily attending” had no super spreader events, yet was still fined 1.2 Million dollars. One of my senior customers that goes to a different church, said to me at the time “they won’t even let me go to church.” It was Hell and very much like prison as close families, friendships, businesses etc. were ruined, as those d#mn so called leaders and un elected officials received their paychecks and blamed most of it on the unvaxed. Never again!!! Sara Cody is in no way a hero, she is a big Zero!!! I tried many times to talk sense to Sara Cody, but it fell on deaf ears and she should resign and apologize to the millions that were affected by her personal fears. A Stanford doctor amongst others warned her of the long term massive collateral damage to kids and families and she ignored that too. The worst was ok with her, otherwise she would have stepped down as other health directors did, and still not even a public apology as she completely shattered her Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Honestly I don’t know how she sleeps at night. Sara Cody and James Williams should be relieved of their positions ASAP so this county can finally move on from their damage. The Santa Clara county Supervisors stupidly idolized Sara Cody and ignored public outcry as well. I followed their actions and am speaking from eyewitness evidence based testimony.
It was embarrassing to live in the only county in the United States to be told by the U.S. Supreme Court that our Covid restrictions had gone too far and were in violation of the Constitution. If Cody discusses how the lockdown intersected with democracy, she should explain why she took such an extreme approach. And she should explain why counties with fewer restrictions had fewer deaths.
I hope her book reveals the fraud associated with local Covid restrictions. Early in the lockdown, a motorcyclist was killed on Skyline Boulevard. As I understand it, there was an argument about where his body would be taken. He finally ended up in the Emergency Department of Stanford Hospital even though he was obviously dead. Why? They wanted to admit him and perform a Covid test on him. If he had Covid, the hospital could get additional funding and his death would be added to the county death toll. For many, the pandemic was just an excuse to ripoff the taxpayers. The county should have stopped this.
Let’s keep in mind that “Covid” is not over in Santa Clara County, which has an active standing health order requiring anyone who enters or works for a medical clinic, hospital, or other healthcare facility to wear a mask between the months of November through March every year now. No other county requires masking for patients…and how does Santa Clara County compare to the non-mask required counties in terms of illness, cases, hospitalizations, etc.? Is everyone else wrong and Santa Clara County right? Pre-2020, no doctor, nurse, administrator, or patient – outside an operating room – ever wore a mask in a clinic or hospital. Doctors rountinely treated flu patients during every flu season and never got sick themselves. Natural immunity anyone?
I am just as disappointed in the people who went along with the psyop of the past four years, whether for political or personal reasons, and saw first-hand how the public can be easily coerced after 24/7 fear-mongering to go along with anything. The Covid tyranny is also a reminder that the worst people rise to the top in politics. The government officials and politicians, many of whom are compromised to begin with, are promoted for their ability to follow orders from the higher-up, spread lies, and to not question anything.
They never mention how the “contact tracing” program went? That was the program where, if you caught covid, you’d have to reveal the names of everybody you had been with over the past several days. I haven’t heard anything about it. And since they only tout their successes, my guess is that contract tracing was a failure. Yet is wasted millions of tax dollars and gleaned the personal information of county residents without a court order.