“I want my grandchildren to know I fought. I fought. I didn’t stop fighting. I will pick this thing apart until somebody’s behind bars… And we need to make sure this man [Xavier Becerra] doesn’t become our governor.” —Julie Threet
In my first interview with Julie, she talked about her experiences as a volunteer at a mass vaccination clinic in rural Butte County, California.
Becerra’s Stealth Visit to Butte County, CA, in March 2022
In this first part of our second interview, Julie Threet walked me through a chain of FOIA’d emails between a high HHS official, Bonnie Preston, and public health officials in Butte County.
Seemingly out of the blue, on March 7, 2022, Preston, who then was HHS Director of US Region 9, contacted Butte County’s former public health director Dr. Bernstein to discuss how to increase the Covid mRNA shot injection rate for children. Exactly one week later, Becerra paid a stealth visit to the county and met with a handful of carefully selected pediatricians and parents. Almost nobody knew about this secret meeting until it was over and Becerra had left.
Why Butte County? Because at that time it had California’s lowest Covid-19 mRNA injection rate for children between age 5 and 11: 16%.
Julie said:
“They wanted to keep it [the meeting] under wraps, they wanted to have a private conversation. They clearly excluded even our state elected officials. They didn’t want them there, they wanted it to be a closed press and I was outraged… I wasn’t getting any information out of them during the public session. So finally, I think it was 2023, I did a FOIA request to get all this information out of the county.
“So I submitted a public records request and I got a data dump consisting of a ton of emails, PowerPoint presentation, PDF files and Word documents about exactly what happened in this meeting. And so it’s a lot of information which I finally put together in a kind of story form so we can follow along and see what really happened in that private meeting. Why was he here? And we answered that question.”
Becerra, as the FOIA’d documents show, came to Butte County determined to figure out how to get more kids in Butte County as well as neighbouring counties injected with the mRNA Covid-19 shots.
Why were pediatricians invited to the meeting? Becerra wanted to hear from them why so few parents brought their 5 to 11 year olds to Butte County’s mass vaccination clinics and why pediatricians didn’t inject the kids themselves right in their practices.
HHS Used the “Minority Health Social Vulnerability Index” to Target Regions With Low Injection Rates
Exactly one month after Becerra visited Butte County, he explained how HHS officials targeted specific regions during the Pandemic. Becerra made those revealing comments during what was called the “White House Convening on Equity” event on April 14, 2022:
“We established a Minority Health Social Vulnerability Index. A vulnerability index which helps us collect data, good quality data with a better collection methodology so we could actually figure out where we needed to go rather than wait for you to come to us.” 1
That’s how HHS officials discovered that little Butte County, rural and conservative leaning, had California’s lowest injection rate for children .
What they also discovered was that among the overall low injection rate of kids in Butte County and surrounding counties, Hispanic and Native American kids had even lower injection rates than white kids. That’s why HHS officials zeroed in on minority kids and invited mainly those pediatricians to the meeting who practiced in areas with high percentages of minority kids. They were singled out among the singled out ones under the disguise of “Health Equity.”
The whole story of the meeting and its sinister consequences unfolds in all its banal evil in the email chain below.
There were many additional documents in the FOIA dump that Julie received and in the second part of the interview we’ll go over some of those.
“How do you think Secretary Becerra could assist to up that rate for young people in Butte County?” - Bonnie Preston, March 2022
Acting Director and Executive HHS officer Bonnie Preston sent a first email to Dr. Robert Bernstein on the evening of Monday, March 7, 2022.
Later that year, in November of 2022, Preston ceased being Acting Director but continued on as Executive Officer for Region 9 until July 2025.
This first email wasn’t the first time she made contact with him. Preston had called Bernstein that same evening.
The email makes crystal clear why she called him and what they discussed. She gets right to the point, have a look:
Bonnie Preston: “Do we involve the County Health Department?”
The last question Preston asks Goldstein in her email is astonishing: “Do we involve the County Health Department?” This tells us two things: Preston was aware that Bernstein did no longer work for Butte County’s Health Department but contacted him anyway instead of Erin Cox, then Division Director at the Butte County Public Health. And, secondly, Preston apparently did that because she hadn’t decided whether it was a good idea to involve the county’s health department or not.
Preston, it seems, wasn’t sure whether Butte County’s Public Health Department could be trusted to be part of the cabal.
At this point, Preston has no idea what exactly should be done to “up that [injection] rate in Butte County for young people.” Get kids talking about vaccines? Get kids to sign up for injection appointments? Get parents to sign up their kids for the injections? Are third partners needed to get this rolling? Maybe Sierra Nevada Brewing?
Who is Dr. Robert Bernstein?
Why was Dr. Robert Bernstein, who was no longer working for Butte County’s Public Health Department, the first point of contact for Bonnie Preston? Why was he someone she trusted enough to ask him the astonishing question about whether to even involve the county’s health department?
Bernstein is an interesting man. His career spans many decades of international work in academia, public health roles on federal, state and local levels (including 24 years at the CDC as epidemiologist and 7 years for USAID), international organizations (for example 5 years at the WHO) and private corporations (Pfizer and others).
He’d been Butte’s County Health Officer during the Pandemic from August 2020 until September 2021. Remarkable that the word ‘Covid-19’ or ‘Pandemic’ does not appear once in his lengthy description of the job.
Becerra’s “Challenge” to Butte County to Increase Kids’ Injection Rates
During the meeting, Becerra issued a “challenge” to the county.
Butte County was told to apply for FEMA public assistance funding to pay for outreach, education and vaccination campaigns targeting kids and minorities, in particular Native American and Hispanic kids of whom many live in the region.
Right away, Butte County obediently applied for FEMA funding. The money, $225,00 in total, was promptly provided by FEMA and was used to run vaccine clinics at a mall, a county fair and at the county’s famous Sierra Nevada Brewery.
Suppression of Organized Opposition at Butte County’s Board of Supervisors Meetings
Two days after Becerra’s stealth visit to Butte County, Julie Threet received a remarkable email. She told me:
“Diana Dreiss and two other people who I won’t name, but the four of us have been at the county screaming about these vaccines, yelling and screaming: stop them! We get an email on this Wednesday after Becerra leaves saying: ‘Good afternoon. As we begin to transition back to normal business happenings, I wanted to give you a quick update on board meetings and what the transitioning back to pre-pandemic status looks like. There will be no more COVID update from the director of public health. Public comment will return to its usual place as the last regular item on the agenda.’”
FOIA’d notes from the secret meeting show that pediatricians and/or parents said one of the reasons why people in Butte County didn’t get their kids vaccinated was that every week during the Board of Supervisors meeting, citizens used the public comment period to warn about the shots.
Moving the public comment period to the very end of the meetings made it logistically way more challenging for Julie and the others to attend the meetings. And that was, she believes, the true reason for ending the Covid update from the county’s director of public health.
“They literally took away the COVID health update, number one. So they took out one of our voices during those meetings. And number two, they took the 1 p.m. time and said, we’re just gonna have it at the end of the meeting, meaning we had to stay the whole day, which a lot of times we couldn’t. So they literally needed to shut up the loudest voices there at these meetings. And they did it literally.”
Removing the health update and returning the Board of Supervisors’ meeting structure to normal was illegal:
“This breaks a law because if you have a stated public health emergency in your county, you have to have a COVID update. And they didn’t take away the public health emergency until June. This is important for my legal case [since] this is a Brown Act violation or public emergency violation. There’s some violation. You have to have a Covid report. But they didn’t want the four of us at these meetings screaming about the dangers of the COVID vaccine. And they wanted to make it as hard as possible.”
The FOIA’d Documents Tell the Sordid Story
Below are screenshots of the most important documents in chronological order. Bolding, highlights etc. are not in the original documents.
“We’re excited to work with Secretary Becerra on improving these numbers.”
The morning after Preston’s surprise call to Dr. Bernstein, Erin Cox, then Division Director at the Butte County Public Health Department, emailed Preston and told her how excited she was to improve the injection rates for kids: “It has been a population that we have been working hard to access.”
Apparently, she felt the need to defend herself and the County: she included kids’ injection rates for Butte County as well as for three neighboring counties probably so that Preston would realize Butte County wasn’t the worst offender. Tehama, Yuba and Shasta all had “worse” rates.
In the same email, Cox included a table listing the county’s vaccination drives at schools during 2021 (with one event in 2022). It appears as if she wanted to proof to Preston that Butte County had tried hard to inject kids.
“Pull parents from equity focused groups.”
On the same day, March 8, Cox emails Danette York, Butte County’s Public Health Director, with an update.
It’s the job of Butte County’s public health department, she tells Danette, “to bring together local contacts to attend the even.”
Erin Cox wants to pull in “local contacts” from organizations that are all based in Oroville, half an hour drive south of Chico, the town where the meeting with Becerra took place:
The NAACP
The Hmong Cultural Center of Butte County
The AAFCC (African American Family & Cultural Center)
The Oroville Hospital Peds Clinic (Oroville Hospital operates two outpatient clinics, both based in Oroville)
All these groups serve minorities and the reason they are all located in Oroville is that many more Indian Americans, Hmong Chinese, Hispanics and African Americans live in Oroville than in Chico.
Pediatricians Will Provide “insight into the hesitancy surrounding the Covid vaccine and children.”
On Wednesday, March 9, agreement was reached to do a roundtable discussion with pediatricians, but not just any pediatricians. No, only those pediatricians that “would be great to get at a roundtable.” That surely excluded all those local pediatricians who weren’t big fans of the shots. Cox emails Preston and others:
“I have not yet heard back from any participants.”
On Thursday, March 10, Molly emails Danette York and others the timeline for Becerra’s visit. He’ll spend an entire 60 minutes in Chico, Butte County - a blitz visit.
And she informs them that so far none of the carefully selected pediatricians and parents have responded to the invitation.
Only 2 of the 5 invited Supervisors Agreed to Attend
County Governments in California consist of the so-called Board of Supervisors. A board usually has 5 supervisors. It is executive, legislative and quasi-judiciary all wrapped up in one.
In March of 2022, three of Butte County’s Board of Supervisors were Republicans, two were Democrats. All five were invited to the roundtable but only the Democrat Supervisors accepted the invitation.
All three Republican Supervisors chickened out. Not one of them attended.
Feather River Tribal Health and Northern Valley Indian Health
By the next day, March 11, ten pediatricians had accepted the invitation.
Below is the list of their names and the medical groups they work for. Half of them work for groups that are located in areas with large Native American populations where pediatric injection rates are very low.
State Senate and State Assembly Members Are Not Invited
Becerra and Preston didn’t want to have Republican Assemblyman James Gallagher at the meeting nor Butte County’s State Senator. Too risky. They might have rocked the boat and that had to be prevented.
Note that it’s the unelected bureaucrats who call all the shots whereas elected representatives aren’t even told, as you will see, about the time and location of the meeting with Becerra (another unelected bureaucrat).
On March 11, Preston checks in with Cox to make sure that they won’t be invited. It seems that she does feel compelled to justify her action by providing a reason (an absurd one) as to why they shouldn’t be invited.
Julie told me that Butte County’s state assemblyman James Gallagher in particular is much respected and liked and that she saw no reason why pediatricians wouldn’t want to talk in his presence.
When Erin Cox reassures Bonnie Preston that Gallagher won’t be invited, Preston responds: “Thank you! I’m not going to tell them (state electeds) when and where.”
Pesky creatures, these state electeds. Can’t be trusted with delicate affairs.
Preston then emailed Gallagher in the afternoon of Sunday, March 13, the day before the meeting, to notify him that the meeting was going to take place the next day. And indeed, she does not inform him where and when the meeting will happen, making sure there is no way Gallagher might show up uninvited.
Preston offers to provide him with a readout - in case he’s interested. So gracious.
Commander Johns: Partner in Crime
On Monday, March 14, the meeting takes place as planned. It was closed to the press. But there are notes from the meeting that were among the FOIA’d documents and Julie talks about what they say in the second part of her interview.
The day after the meeting, a new character enters the scene: Commander Matthew Johns from HHS, OS, OASH, RHA.
OS: Office of the Secretary of HHS
OASH: Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health
RHA: Regional Health Administrator
At 10:29am on March 15, Commander Johns sent an email to the public health crew at Butte County in which he informs them that he’s their liaison to the Office of Health Equity at California’s Department of Public Health. Johns tells them that he will command funding from FEMA which will be funneled through the Health Equity office to Butte County.
“I look forward to tackling this challenge together,” he writes. Which challenge? Clearly a challenge that Becerra issued during the meeting. Clearly something having to do with increasing the injection rate of the 5 to 11 year old children. Perhaps the challenge was a certain percentage increase over a certain amount of time?
At the end of his email he writes: “Always feel free to text me anytime. It’s often the best way to chat through public health solutions.”
Yeah, just text me if you need more cash to get more kids injected in your God forsaken county.
“We are excited to accept Secretary Becerra’s challenge.”
Butte County’s health officials accepted the mysterious “challenge” immediately, most likely during the meeting itself.
Danette York, Butte County’s Public Health Director, sent the email below just hours after the meeting, in the afternoon of March 14:
Direct Mailers to Equity Focused Zip Codes
Butte County’s Public Health Department lost no time putting a plan together as instructed by HHS.
Erin Cox emails her team on the day after the meeting informing everyone that the “goal is to focus on pediatric vaccine efforts in terms of education, outreach and marketing. We discussed [presumably in the meeting] direct mailers to equity focused zip codes, commercials and one on ones with our pediatric providers.”
The money needs to be spent within the next three months. Becerra and his commanders want the plan to be “innovative and out of the box.”
Butte County’s Public Health bureaucrats did come up with some exquisite ideas, straight out of the box. Incredibly creative ideas like setting up vaccination clinics at a movie theatre, a mall, a country fair and a brewery. Not quite as alluring as Pleasure Island but hey, they tried. And, Julie told me, it worked: kids were injected at all these places.
On March 29, Danette York obediently emailed Becerra the request for funding he had requested she should request: “Please find the enclosed request to fund a project designed to increase the Covid-19 injection rates in children.”
And she emphasizes that this is just the first step in “moving forward with our next phase of providing COVID-19 vaccinations for children through provider enrollment.”
“Butte County’s Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccine Project”
Below are excerpts from Butte County’s Request for Funding. BCPH stands for Butte County Public Health.
In this part of the funding request, Butte County describes in detail the “objectives” and “deliverables” of their “Pediatric Vaccine Project.”
Goal one is to increase the number of pediatricians vaccinating kids in their practices.
Goal two is to reduce “vaccine hesitancy among parents of children.”
Below you see the project’s timeline. The money had to be spent by June 30, 2022, and then there would be more money made available from California’s Department of Health Immunization Assistance Program Covid-19 grant.
And note this: “Vaccination rates will be monitored on a monthly basis to evaluate whether these efforts are having a significant impact and/or whether new and different approaches need to be implemented.”
The budget:
Future funding and Conclusion are below.
“BCPH plans to fulfill our mission by increasing overall pediatric vaccination rates within Butte County, while focusing on reaching those children who are especially vulnerable due to their socioeconomic status.”
Federal, state and local bureaucracies will not rest until they have vulnerated you in the name of protecting you.
CHAPTERS
02:08 Secret Visit Of HHS Secretary Becerra To Chico
06:08 Filing The FOIA Request About Becerra’s Butte County Meeting
17:34 Butte County Flagged For Lowest Pediatric Covid Vaccination Rates
23:45 Targeting Children Through Schools And Pediatric Provider Enrollment Barriers
31:55 Public Health Language About “Targeting This Population”
33:20 Shifting Focus From Chico To Oroville As An “Equity Focused” Rural Target Area
35:41 Equity Framing, NAACP, Hmong Community, And Selecting Specific Parent Groups
39:13 Strategy Pivot: Secret Pediatric Roundtable In Chico And Excluding Broader Public
49:00 Scramble To Recruit Select Pediatricians And List Of Participating Clinics
52:09 Focus On Native American And Underserved Clinics As Key Vaccination Channels
1:00:04 Notifying California Health Chief Mark Ghaly And Framing Shots As “Vital Resource”
1:08:02 Last-Minute Sunday Email To Assemblyman Gallagher Offering Only A Readout
1:11:51 Post-Event Thank-You Email: Accepting Becerra’s “Challenge” And Next-Step Plan
1:13:51 FEMA-Funded Follow-Up: Office Of Health Equity, Commander Matthew Johns
RESOURCES
White House Convening on Equity - YouTube: 45 minutes in
