Santa Clara County Public Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody, who issued the nation’s first lockdown order during the pandemic five years ago, announced today she is retiring.
Cody, a Palo Alto resident and a Yale medical school graduate, became a controversial figure in 2020 by ordering the closure of businesses to prevent the spread of Covid.
She also issued the first stay-at-home order in the nation.
After the pandemic, she 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 was also writing a memoir about her experiences as the county’s top health officer during the pandemic.
Cody’s last day with the county is April 11, 2025. Deputy Health Officer, Dr. Sarah Rudman, will serve as Acting Health Officer and Director.
Dr. Cody is a hero! Her dedication to protecting Santa Clara County residents during the worst of times was unmatched. I thank her for her hard work and commitment to doing what was right, making tough choices. Thank you for your service. Enjoy retirement!
Simping for authoritarians – “Please, take away my liberty, right to travel, gather with friends and family, ability to earn a living or visit my dying elderly parents in a nursing home, and also close the schools, gyms and all extra-curriculars for children so their rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide skyrocket, and mandate that I restrict my own oxygen by wearing a filthy, synthetic mask that doesn’t work, that I pulled out of my pocket or off my rearview mirror for the 52nd time in a row but is great fear porn, especially for scaring young children – “my body, my choice” be damned!
And do everything that I’m told without doing any of my own research, like reading the Fan Wu paper from 2020 that started the hysteria by identifying a sick man in Wuhan who exhibited symptoms of pneumonia (high fever, shortness of breath) and whose lung tissue sequences were manipulated in silico to arrive at something that matched by 89% similarity the 2003 “SARS” virus (along with 8 other “viruses”, including HIV, but not helpful to start a pandemic) which was also manipulated by a computer.
What a role model you are, Stacey Ross, for all those who question and research nothing and place all their blind trust in government.
Remember her saying she needed three weeks to flatten the curve?
Or do you remember the 6-foot rule?
Or how masks stop the spread?
What Dr. Cody didn’t say was that Covid was relatively mild, targeting the elderly and this was obvious in early 2020. People with comorbidities needed to be isolated but not the vast majority of adults.
She could have told us the truth. Instead we destroyed businesses and lives. Kids lost more than a year of education.
And Santa Clara County had worse outcomes than the other BAy Area counties.
Now that she’s retiring, it would be nice if she apologized.
All correct.
Thanks for the lockdowns Sarah. I’m sure you will miss the power.
Good riddance.
The lesson we should have learned from the pandemic is that authoritarianism doesn’t work. The law gave too much power to county health officers like Dr. Cody. Some county health officers were careful with the restrictions they imposed. Dr. Cody was reckless. One only has to look at the extraordinary amount of fines imposed on restaurants to see that. Or the county’s efforts to close churches, which drew a rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court. Cody, like most county health officers, took her cues from the CDC, NIH and HHS, which were driven by politics not science. Cody had a good education — Yale and Stanford — so she knew what she was doing was wrong. But groupthink is powerful. Just look at Deborah’s comment above. If you want to defend Cody, ask yourself this question — how come Santa Clara County had a higher per capita mortality rate than any other Bay Area county? Outcomes say it all. Authoritarianism never works.
So many untimely deaths in the last few years. This is your legacy, Sara Cody.