Ryan Warner (2:32)

Yeah. This is Matthew Barrett, by the way.

Dan Rubenstein (2:34)

Yes. Specifically that, you know, he referenced that she was peddling snake oil and talking about there not being any evidence that certainly in Mesa county there were any ballots tampered with or anything that would indicate the election wasn't perfectly valid in 2020. Of course, Mesa county is one of the reddest counties in Colorado, and President Trump overwhelmingly won in Mesa County. So certainly any suggestion that the election was tampered with is a little curious.

Ryan Warner (3:02)

The decision from the judge said, in part, the court failed to acknowledge that Peters is no longer Mesa county clerk, no longer in a position to engage in the conduct that led to her conviction. So it cannot be said that the lengthy prison sentence was for specific deterrence. To the contrary, the sentence punished Peters for her persistence in espousing her beliefs regarding the integrity of the 2020 election. I suppose you could read that as persistence, but underlying this was a lack of contrition. How do you balance, you know, having read the decision, the free speech stuff, and the question a judge faces about whether a defendant feel sorry for what

Dan Rubenstein (3:45)

they did, it's difficult to read the opinion and not conclude that the Court of Appeals believes Judge Barrett let her free speech part of this into his decision. I don't think that that's necessarily true. And I've known Judge Barrett for quite some time. He's been a district court judge for a while. He was a magistrate here before that. He was a chief deputy DA before that. And know that he is the type of fair, honest person who, if that did happen, he will split that out and issue a different sent sentence next time. But knowing him and knowing the way he saw this case and he saw her, not just lack of contrition, but her conduct throughout the entire pendency of the case showed an utter disregard for the law. There was so many other things going on at the time. There were civil actions to remove her as the designated election officer. She was banned from the Clerk and Recorder's office by a protection order and continued to remain at home collecting the salary of an elected official without resigning. I mean, there's just a lot of things that really victimized and traumatized Mesa county that District Court. Judge Barrett, who lives in this community, was aware of, and they were not related to her belief about the election. So we will find out when Judge Barrett issues his resentencing and see whether or not he changes the sentence at all.

Ryan Warner (5:09)

Now, that presumes Tina Peters and her attorneys don't appeal to the state Supreme Court. What are the various options here? First of all, in terms of the sentence, I suppose it could be reduced. It's not impossible that, considering the First Amendment issues, the sentence stays the same.

Dan Rubenstein (5:28)

The Court of Appeals did note that the sentence was on the longer side, but they didn't anywhere in the opinion indicate that Judge Barrett is required to reduce the sentence. So it will still be entirely up to him. He can't give a longer sentence, but as long as he justifies his sentence on non First Amendment bases and other proper bases, he could give the same sentence. He could shorten it. He could give prosecution probation. I don't anticipate certain sort of extreme versions of it, but we'll sort of have to wait and see. I don't think there's going to be a sentencing hearing. I think at whatever point it gets returned to him, he has already heard the argument, he's already heard the evidence. He already presided over the trial. The Court of Appeals declined to put a new judge on it. And there's certainly abundant case law saying that the court that heard the trial should be the sentencing judge. So I anticipate Judge Barrett will probably have a written order, and the day that it gets returned to him for resentencing, he'll probably issue that order.

Ryan Warner (6:21)

Okay, a few things there. It can't get longer. It could get shorter. Could stay the same. You don't anticipate a hearing. What are the various timelines here? Yeah, that's what's the soonest it could be.

Dan Rubenstein (6:32)

Both sides have 42 days to petition the Supreme Court for a writ of certiori. That's a discretionary appeal that goes to the Supreme Court. Everybody has a first appeal as a matter of a right to the Court of Appeals, and then anything beyond that is discretionary.

Ryan Warner (6:44)

So about a month and a half.

Dan Rubenstein (6:45)

Okay, so about a month and a half. And I do not anticipate the prosecution is going to appeal the decision on the ruling. Ultimately, I think it's probably the best thing for Judge Barrett to clean up that record and issue a written order with a very clean record that makes abundantly clear that it's not based upon First Amendment issues. So we're not going to appeal. We won everything else. I would anticipate that Ms. Peters is likely to appeal. And the reason I think that is because up until now, she has maintained that she didn't do anything wrong, that everything she did was lawful, that she was protected by federal supremacy, immunity, because she was trying to protect checked election records. So it would be very inconsistent with how she's approached this case from the very beginning.

Ryan Warner (7:26)

If she doesn't appeal, if she doesn't

Dan Rubenstein (7:28)

appeal, to all of a sudden abandon that and accept the Court of Appeals conclusion that Judge Barrett did everything right up until that time of sentencing and that there was sufficient evidence to convict her.

Ryan Warner (7:37)

So we'll get a sense of this within 42 days, within 42 days. If there's not an appeal, then.

Dan Rubenstein (7:42)

So the three options are, in 42 days, if nobody appeals, Judge Barrett will do the resentencing. If somebody appeals, we'll have a short period for the Supreme Court to decide if they're going to hear the case. If the answer is no, then it will get sent to Judge Barrett for the resentencing. If the answer is yes, we'll need to wait to hear what the Supreme Court says, and they might come to a different conclusion than the Court of Appeals, but we might not know that for maybe a year to a year and a half.

Ryan Warner (8:05)

You know, in 2021, Governor Polis reduced the sentence of a truck driver who'd caused a fatal accident. At the time, you criticized the decision because the governor had made that call before the legal process could play out.

Dan Rubenstein (8:19)

I recall that, yes.

Ryan Warner (8:20)

Here we are talking about a legal process that has not concluded by any means, even though we have the appellate ruling. Do you hope the governor, the president, will heed that same feedback you applied to the truck driver and say, let this process play out before there is any other tinkering? Executive tinkering.

Dan Rubenstein (8:42)

First, let me say I'm not worried about the president's role in this, because the president has no authority, as I have long believed. And the Court of Appeals just made clear.

Ryan Warner (8:50)

Yeah. Upholding this idea that there is no federal jurisdiction here because these are in state charges.

Dan Rubenstein (8:55)

So the conversations I've had with the governor, both personally and with the governor's chief counsel, who I talk to fairly often, she's made very clear to me that I will be the first one that she will call if the governor is intending to actually do something. But the message that's being communicated to me is that he was going to wait until this process played out, certainly until the Court of Appeals announced their decision. Now that they have announced their decision that they would like Judge Barrett to reconsider his ruling and do a resentencing, I'm going to continue to request the governor to stay out of this. While I did criticize him in 2021 for what he did in that trucker case, he certainly does have that legal authority to intervene. But there's a lot of complications. What if the governor were to commute the sentence to a shorter sentence? Now, does that render the Court of Appeals opinion moot with respect to that sentencing? I mean, what is Judge Barrett to do if the governor has stepped in and already changed the sentence?

Ryan Warner (9:52)

Muddles things, right?

Dan Rubenstein (9:54)

It muddles things a lot.

Ryan Warner (9:55)

I want to say that you made a little news here by saying you're pleased enough with the appellate court decision that you have no intention yourself as Mesa county district attorney of appealing this.

Dan Rubenstein (10:09)

Yeah, And I should clarify that. The attorney general's office represents us in the appellate process. And I did have a zoom meeting with the attorneys handling this case to have the conversation about whether or not we should be appealing ourselves specifically on this issue with regard to the First Amendment and the sentencing. And we were all generally in agreement that that's not something that we're interested in doing. However, we still have 42 days to make that decision, or at least 42 days from the date the sentence was issued to make that decision. It's possible we could change. I just don't see why we would appeal it. I think really the best thing is for Judge Barrett to clean up that sentencing record because this could theoretically get sent up to the US Supreme Court because it's a First Amendment of the US Constitutional issue. So it could go from the Court of Appeals to the Colorado Supreme Court and ultimately to the US Supreme Court to make a determination. And I would really just prefer that he clean it up and make sure

Ryan Warner (11:08)

it's clear, as tidy a record as possible if it gets to the highest court in the land. Thank you so much for being with us.

Dan Rubenstein (11:15)

Thank you for having me.

Ryan Warner (11:16)

Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubenstein prosecuted the former county clerk here, Tina Peters in 2024. CPR News is scheduled to speak with Peters attorney today. Our coverage will continue@cpr.org still to come, old timey diseases make a comeback. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. I'm Ryan Warner. Measles was considered vanquished in this country. As cases climb and vaccination rates fall, the US risks losing its elimination distinction. Dr. Jennifer Reich studies vaccine hesitancy at CU Denver. She wrote an op ed in the New York Times the other day about how ill equipped hospitals are when it comes to a resurgence of measles and other diseases. Hi, Doc.

Jennifer Reich (12:13)

Hi. Thanks again for inviting me in.

Ryan Warner (12:15)

Some important numbers, Colorado's seen 13 measles cases as of this taping. That puts us on track to break last year's total. Many of the cases heretofore are linked to an outbreak at Broomfield High School. Everyone affected either wasn't vaccinated or fully vaccinated. What's your level of concern?

Jennifer Reich (12:36)

You know, we are in a new era of how we all think of risk in our personal lives. Some people might think that the fact that the Broomfield outbreak was contained after 10 cases is a victory. Other people might look at those same numbers and think, how is it possible we had 10 cases when in 2000, measles had been deemed eradicated in the US we had eliminated it, and now we're staring down in the next two weeks losing potentially our eradication status, which comes after 12 months of continuous spread. So we'll find out in mid April whether we lose that status from the World Health Organization. And so, you know, I think whether people think this is good news or bad news in terms of the number of cases depends on what your threshold is for infectious disease and how much child illness you find acceptable.

Ryan Warner (13:22)

Do I hear inherent in that, that it could be worse?

Jennifer Reich (13:25)

You know, the measles vaccine has been around for a long time. It's a really successful vaccine. In two doses, it provides lifelong immunity. And we still have a critical mass of the population that's fully immunized. And even today, we have to always rem remember that most parents support immunization and most parents fully vaccinate their children. What's been concerning, I think nationally, as we've seen rates drop below what's required to keep diseases at bay. So what they call the herd immunity level. Because measles is considered one of the most contagious diseases ever recorded. One infected person is expected to be able to infect 12 to 18 other people because the virus can stay in the air for over two hours after the infected person has left the room. So it's really.

Ryan Warner (14:08)

Does it fly? How does anything stay in the air for two hours that doesn't have wings?

Jennifer Reich (14:12)

It just sits in the air in a very fine kind of mist and can be breathed in. So when we think about when measles showed up at Disneyland in 2014, it was impossible to find the index case or the person who brought it in, because when you think about two hours of people moving through lines for rides, a lot of people were exposed. And so the majority of people are still immunized, but we are below nationwide the 95% threshold necessary to contain outbreaks. And I think what we're seeing now, as we continue to hit new records for outbreaks, is we have pockets of vulnerability. And some of those are people who have chosen to be unimmunized. And some are amongst families who have reasons where they really can't participate and rely on the rest of us to make sure that they can be safe.

Ryan Warner (14:55)

You've spoken to the, I think virulence of measles what is the lethality and effect of it?

Jennifer Reich (15:01)

Just briefly, you know, people say, like, people don't die of measles, they die. Pneumonia is the leading cause of death of measles. What's worth acknowledging is that people develop pneumonia because of measles infection, and that tends to be what kills children. Children who are younger die more often. But even for the children who survive, we have high rates of things like deafness, brain damage, neuromuscular and other kinds of disorders that have resulted from infection. And then we should acknowledge that of the other things we know the measles virus can do, it can cause immune amnesia, where your body forgets its immunity to every other virus you've ever encountered.

Ryan Warner (15:37)

Whoa, wait, wait, wait. What?

Jennifer Reich (15:39)

So measles can cause amnesia for your immune system where you forget how to fight all the other viruses you've ever encountered? And potentially worse than that, we know a very rare but possible side effect is that the measles virus can cause an untreatable lethal condition as much as seven to ten years later that there's no solution to. And it starts with a neurological degeneration, usually in children, and has no cure. And that's a really.

Ryan Warner (16:05)

Kid thinks they're fine, and then years later, something creeps up.

Jennifer Reich (16:09)

So we have a child this year in California who was infected as an infant, made a full recovery, was thriving, as children often do after infections, and then started stumbling and having trouble with vision and started down this road of degenerative disease until he died.

Ryan Warner (16:26)

I hear you saying two things. We still have critical mass, you say, but we've fallen beneath herd immunity. How are those things both true?

Jennifer Reich (16:37)

Yeah, no, that's a great question. So depending on how contagious a disease is, tells us the level of the population that needs to be immunized to create almost like a firewall.

Ryan Warner (16:46)

Yeah.

Jennifer Reich (16:47)

And so if you think about. If an infected person is surrounded by people who are fully immunized, that virus is really not going to spread from the infected person to a person who's vulnerable. When we have fewer people who are fully immunized, we no longer have real bubbles or barriers between people who are vulnerable and people who are infectious. And that's where we start to see these outbreaks showing up. And because we know that vaccine hesitancy clusters, so people tend to surround themselves with other people who agree with them, politically or socially. There's a higher chance of being infected because you might be around more people who are also unimmunized.

Ryan Warner (17:23)

Okay, this is fascinating. So there may be critical mass Nationally, across broad communities. But you're talking about these specific pockets where there is vulnerability. Who is most reliant on herd immunity, which we seem to have lost?

Jennifer Reich (17:40)

You know, I think it's a great question to say, like, who benefits most? Because the answer really depends. The measles vaccine is largely ineffective in children under the age of one, and they're the most likely to suffer the worst outcomes of infection. So we know that by vaccinating young children who are around babies, making sure people maintain immunity, we protect the most vulnerable amongst that and that first year of life when they're the youngest and smallest and the least able to protect themselves with the smallest airways and the highest chance of developing pneumonias. But we also know that through the life course, there's reasons people become immune compromised. We know that there's people undergoing chemotherapy or organ transplantation who are vulnerable. We know that people sometimes lose immune memory as they get older. We have examples of people who just are the rare person who, no matter if they get immunized or not, will not develop adequate immunity to protect themselves. And so when we think about this as a community strategy, we can think about how people like you and me, who might be able to be fully immunized safely, protect the people around us.

Ryan Warner (18:38)

I just want to mention the most recent Colorado case was an infant too young to receive the vaccine. So we're seeing that right here in our own community.

Jennifer Reich (18:46)

What I was going to highlight, though, is that, you know, you and I are talking about this in terms of a public health strategy, a collective strategy, and what can I do to protect other people, or what can my children do to contribute to the people around them? But what I find in my research is that people don't imagine vaccines that way anymore, and that's fundamentally changed for us. So people are more likely to think about vaccines as a personal benefit and a technology of sort of optimization, right? So if you want them, you should get them to protect yourself. And if I don't want to, I shouldn't have to. And that vocabulary feels really compelling because we've individualized so many things socially, including responsibility for health and illness. But it's not true in an infectious disease because you cannot fully control your risk, and I cannot fully determine whether my infection stays with me. And yet the way we talk about vaccines, and honestly, the way some of the companies have marketed vaccines over time has encouraged us to think about this as a personal choice for personal benefit, when in reality, it's a personal choice that could have consequences for others around us.

Ryan Warner (19:47)

You in your New York Times op ed also invoked polio and hepatitis. Are they getting enough attention?

Jennifer Reich (19:54)

Measles gets the most attention because it's the most contagious. Hepatitis B in particular is interesting. We have new national suggestions. It's unclear if they're currently guidelines about individuals who think they're at risk for hepatitis B should choose vaccines. But if you don't think you're at risk, you shouldn't have to. And that's a fundamental misunderstanding of people's individual ability to calculate risk and benefit.

Ryan Warner (20:19)

I mean, that strikes me as almost another dimension of this idea that I'm always in charge of my health and I always make the best decisions.

Jennifer Reich (20:26)

And to be, you know, I'm really sympathetic. Like, I'm a parent myself. I'm making decisions for my family all the time. But I think a lot about how much pressure is on parents today to feel like they can evaluate risk and make informed decisions. There's a lot of information coming at parents, whether it's about school choice, whether it's about traveling soccer teams or tutoring or college admissions or anything. We're supposed to make perfect choices. It's unsurprising that when we get to vaccines, parents feel this pressure to make a perfect decision. And if there's reasons to feel hesitant that maybe this vaccine isn't entirely safe or I don't understand why I might benefit from it, but I don't know about the risks. And you're telling me that my child would have to have close contact with someone who's infected. And I think I know everybody in my, you know, and I imagine I can assess who's infectious and not. I could logically think this isn't for me. Until now, we really had strong recommendations to vaccinate all infants, which provides lifelong immunity, and that's been hugely successful in reducing the cases of hepatitis B.

Ryan Warner (21:27)

Address the point. I hear I don't want my kid getting all those vaccines all at once. I'm gonna cherry pick, I'm gonna delay, I'm gonna space things out.

Jennifer Reich (21:39)

This was a strong feature of my research, and I think it's worth acknowledging that when we talk about people who are unimmunized, most don't object to vaccines, but they don't trust the way that they're recommended. When I ask vaccine researchers, why should someone feel trusting of the current schedule? Because it does look like a lot. What does it mean to get so many vaccines? It's about twice what they were when you and I were children. They consistently tell me that there's actually fewer proteins in each vaccine now than there was 50 years ago, that the technology for creating vaccines and isolating proteins is so much better, that it's so much more precise that this is such a tiny amount compared to anything an immune system encounters on a day to day basis.

Ryan Warner (22:17)

It's not a carpet bombing, but it

Jennifer Reich (22:19)

feels from a parent's perspective like too much. I hear too much too soon all the time. And do they really need these now? What we also forget is that children who are younger are less likely to have an adverse reaction because they have a naive immune system. And also because they have a naive immune system, they benefit the most from early vaccines. So the math is not equal for being a baby and being an adult. And yet we treat them as interchangeable. Parents want what's best for their children. I think we should always remember we all want healthy communities, we all want healthy families. And what we think it takes to get there is where we part company.

Ryan Warner (22:51)

Chris rfk, our country's top health official, a judge has blocked his attempt to scale back childhood vaccine recommendations and the plan would have ended guidance for all kids to be vaccinated against just a slew of contagious illnesses, flu, meningitis, rsv. How much of this has to do with the current administration?

Jennifer Reich (23:13)

So we saw publicly both the president and the secretary of Health and Human Services say that hepatitis B vaccines are not important unless you participate in risk behaviors. It's epidemiologically untrue. We have lots of examples of people who have been infected in childhood who have lifelong liver disease or liver cancer and they have no idea how they contracted it. But we're hearing this from the of the top because right now, I think amongst the vocabulary of make America healthy again and more and more focus on nutrition and supplements and lifestyle, we've I think collectively are being encouraged to overestimate our ability to control infection and illness. And we're really underestimating the ways that we're tied together and that we're vulnerable together.

Ryan Warner (23:54)

Our guest is CU Denver sociologist Jennifer Reich. Her books include Calling the why Parents Reject Vaccines. When we come back, why hospitals are ill equipped for a measles resurgence and why families who hesitate around vaccines don't have as many qualms with antibiotics or hospitals. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News. You're back with Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. I'm Ryan Moerner on assignment in Grand Junction. As measles cases climb and vaccine recommendations weaken, we're speaking with Jennifer Reich, the CU Denver Sociologist, specializes in families healthcare decisions. Okay, let's get to this idea of hospitals ill equipped for a resurgence of measles in particular. Why?

Jennifer Reich (24:48)

You know, I've been thinking about this for a long time because in the course of doing research on parents who opt out of vaccines, I often heard parents were not hesitant about things like antibiotic use, which has a much higher side effect profile than vaccines do. Or were parents who frequently took their kids to the doctor or even to the emergency room when they were concerned, even as they rejected vaccines. And then I've been paying attention over the last several years to what's happening nationally and also regionally to our capacity to take care of children. And what we've seen is that we have lost roughly 30% of pediatric hospital units since 2008. So it started before COVID There are

Ryan Warner (25:29)

just fewer beds for kids in hospitals.

Jennifer Reich (25:31)

There are fewer hospitals that even have pediatric units anymore. And that matters because when people imagine if my child becomes infected, I can take them to the hospital and the hospital will solve it. They will find the right treatment, they will give the right medication, they will provide the respiratory support my child needs when they can't breathe. They may be mistaken. And we saw a preview of this when we saw the surge in RSV cases a few years ago where there were 6, 812 hour waits in emergency rooms nationally and a huge number of children who were in respiratory distress. Some who have complex medical needs already really struggled to get the care they needed in a timely way. And so we know that we may not have capacity if we continue to see an increase in infectious diseases.

Ryan Warner (26:15)

Why did we lose those units?

Jennifer Reich (26:17)

So pediatric medicine, like many things relating to children, is not particularly profitable. So for adult care, a lot of health care comes through Medicare and private insurance, which pays more than Medicaid. Medicaid and Medicaid insures about half of American children. Also, children need fewer complex medical interventions that pay more. And instead they often need support for breathing. They might need oxygen, they might need supervision and IV fluids, which are not big paying ticket items. And Medicaid pays even less. So we know that there's some reasons that hospitals have decided to get out of the pediatric business completely. Some during COVID converted those beds to adult beds and then never brought them back. But some were already thinking of closing because they couldn't afford it. Related to that, though, we also have a declining number of people who want to go into pediatric specialties because those too pay less than the same specialties. For adults, about half of infectious disease fellowships in pediatrics went unfilled last year. So we're not even training people to provide this kind of healthcare moving forward.

Ryan Warner (27:20)

So this is a function of capacity at hospitals, but what about the medical core not having come up at a time when measles was a daily reality?

Jennifer Reich (27:32)

Doctors are getting better at recognizing measles because they're seeing more of it. But we forget that there's a range of diseases we also vaccinate for that young doctors, and I say young like people under 50, have never seen. So things like Hib, which is a devastating disease, looks a lot like meningitis when it presents, but can kill a child very quickly. No one has seen diphtheria in the U.S. right. But we can think about what would it mean for these families to show up in the emergency room or with clinicians who have never seen these diseases before, how long might it take to diagnose it correctly, who might be infected in the process of getting to that diagnosis, and what does it mean to the capacity to care for them? And I just think families need to really think hard as they imagine hospitals will always be able to solve problems that emerge, that they have the limitations of what they've seen in their lifetime.

Ryan Warner (28:18)

I've never even heard of Hib. Was I vaccinated against that drug?

Jennifer Reich (28:21)

I was vaccinated against that very serious illness that fortunately, very few people have seen.

Ryan Warner (28:27)

I want to just point a fascinating dichotomy out. That is, people who avoid vaccines don't appear to avoid hospitals, according to your research. So they trust the back end, but not the front end.

Jennifer Reich (28:43)

Yeah. I found this initially surprising when I started doing research, and then as I started thinking about, I think, where we started our conversation in terms of how do people imagine risk? I think it's easy for people to imagine accepting greater interventions to treat an actual problem than to prevent a hypothetical

Ryan Warner (28:59)

problem, a stitch in time sort of thing.

Jennifer Reich (29:01)

When we think about vaccines, we're thinking about two hypotheticals. You are being presented with the hypothetical that you will encounter this disease and might be decimated by it or might have a mild case. And you are evaluating that in the context of another hypothetical, which is the unlikely but rare possibility your child could have an adverse reaction to a vaccine. And the question is, which do you fear more and which do you trust more? That's a very different calculation than when your child actually can't breathe or is actually struggling or is actually infected with a high fever and needs medical attention.

Ryan Warner (29:33)

And you put great faith in the

Jennifer Reich (29:35)

emergency department because the counterfactual is worse. Right. You don't have another good option here.

Ryan Warner (29:40)

Speaking of money, outbreaks are costly. Mesa county saw 11 measles cases last year. Their public health response went 37 days and required more than 500 staff hours at a price to the county of almost $19,000. Are local public health departments any better equipped than hospitals?

Jennifer Reich (30:03)

You know, it's a great question. Public health took a beating during COVID We exhausted people, but also on a more personal level, we saw, you know, people who've committed their life to supporting communities facing death threats, threats being doxxed. We found a lot of ways that there was a demoralizing experience of trying to do community level health. And we saw we were seeing fewer people sort of move towards those fields in general. We're seeing that also simultaneous to declining federal funding for many of the programs that have been shown to be successful at the community level. And as you know, here in Colorado, we're struggling with our own budget crisis

Ryan Warner (30:38)

in this next year, a billion and a half.

Jennifer Reich (30:40)

And public health agencies are really grappling with how that's going to work and which programs should they prioritize and which should they give up on. And that' preventative programs. Not even talking about what you're talking about, which is the extra costs associated with contract tracing or ring immunizations, where they try to reach out to all contacts and intervene in these kind of emergent situations that are popping up more and more often.

Ryan Warner (31:02)

Does that make rural Colorado more vulnerable?

Jennifer Reich (31:05)

Rural Colorado is, and rural communities in general are vulnerable in a lot of different ways. They have fewer pediatric hospital beds. A lot of hospitals in general are closing in rural areas, and that's been worse for pediatrics. It's worth highlighting that Children's Hospital Colorado, which has a broad network, is serving a seven state region at this point, that they have children coming in from all of our neighboring states, many which have no advanced pediatric care.

Ryan Warner (31:28)

I didn't know it was as high as seven. Wow. Okay.

Jennifer Reich (31:31)

And so we're looking around thinking, you know, what is our capacity to do this? And if you're in a rural community, you're a further distance from a healthcare provider. We've also made it challenging in other ways to access vaccines in rural communities. In terms of who's able to give them, how can they be stored? Do we expect pediatricians to pay for them ahead of time, insure them, and then try to guess how many patients will be coming in? Right. We have some real barriers in general for how to do rural health care and infectious disease is absolutely going to make that worse.

Ryan Warner (32:00)

I'm fascinated to ask you, are other countries seeing increased vaccine skepticism?

Jennifer Reich (32:06)

This has been one of the most surprising and I think depressing things. So the Vaccine Confidence Project estimates that in almost every country in the world, we've seen declining confidence in vaccines since COVID And so Covid transformed something in how I think the average person perceives the benefits of vaccine. The relationship between pharmaceutical companies and government agencies perceives their relationship to their community and their neighbors. And as people suffered a loss of income, a loss of freedom, an emotional loss of family members and friends, people came out of it in a lot of different ways. But declining confidence in vaccines was one of them. And we, we know in the US but also in many other places, rates have not yet bounced back to pre Covid levels.

Ryan Warner (32:50)

If you asked me mid pandemic to write that as the ending of the story, I think I would have told you you were crazy. In other words, you know, a disease comes, there is a rapid reaction in terms of vaccine development, supported, by the way, by the first Trump White House. And it doesn't serve to increase confidence.

Jennifer Reich (33:16)

I think you and I had a conversation around 2021 about how far you were willing to drive to get a vaccine and how miraculous we were all told Summer 2021 was gonna be when everyone was immunized and we could go out together. And. Right. We were promised this kind of technology will solve real world problems. I think it's worth acknowledging that when we didn't know a lot, and I say we like as a collective, and we had uncertainty, there was at times not enough nuance in the answers we got right. I think some of the benefits of COVID were overstated in terms of how long immunity would last. And the benefits of things like not dying might have been undersold because that's been its biggest contribution. There were people who were experiencing some negative effects from the COVID vaccine, and I think there was an effort to dismiss those because we were so excited collectively that we had a solution to this problem. And then even after immunizations came out, it's worth acknowledging that some cities and communities are opted to stay shut down for longer. Schools probably stayed closed longer than they needed to.

Ryan Warner (34:17)

That created a soup and that really

Jennifer Reich (34:20)

harmed people's emotional well being. We know we're still seeing the results of some of the pediatric harms to mental health nationally. And so I think people really felt violated in some ways and have doubled down now on personal freedoms in a way that I don't think we would have expected.

Ryan Warner (34:34)

Ah, it's nuance. I appreciate. Thank you so much for being with us.

Jennifer Reich (34:38)

It's always a pleasure. Thanks so much for me having having me.

Ryan Warner (34:40)

Professor Jennifer Reich of CU Denver. She's the author of Calling the why Parents Reject Vaccines and Colorado Matters returns from here in Grand Junction with ranching women in their own words. This is CPR News. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. I'm Ryan Warner in Grand Junction. Women have ranched here since before Colorado was esteemed, but their work has often gone unseen or been erased. In a new oral history project, female ranchers on the Western Slope open up about their lives.

Katharine Bedell (35:20)

Give me a tractor over a new car any day.

Sierra Westerman (35:23)

Whether you're raising a vegetable, whether you're raising an animal that love that you put into it is eventually what you're going to harvest out of it and then put back into your body.

Jennifer Reich (35:33)

At her funeral, I remember one of the fellow ranchers here in Mesa county saying Martha Bell was the best damn

Ryan Warner (35:39)

cowboy on the Janie Van Winkle talking about her mother. And before that, Tara Carleo and Lana Hutt as featured in Taking Stock, Ranching Women of Colorado. The project comes from Lorena Davis, assistant professor of mass communication at Colorado Mesa University. And Lorena, welcome to the program.

Lorena Davis (36:02)

Thank you so much.

Ryan Warner (36:03)

I understand your grandmother inspired this. Who was she and how did she touch all this off for you?

Lorena Davis (36:11)

My paternal grandmother's name is Thelma Main Bear, and I always admired her as a child coming up, she was so productive and she would write all day. She would make meals for all the ranch hands. And then she kept a beautiful garden and she made sour cherry raspberry jam that I still can taste when I think of it. And she painted her nails and she did her hair and I just felt like she was my super woman. She ended up in a memory ward at a nursing home in Grand Junction. And I would visit her and take her roses because she always had such nice roses in her yard. And she had this little bio that was printed, you know, 8 and a half by 11 sheet of paper tacked up next to her door so that people could interact with her with details from her life. So it's this little bio sheet, what her name is, when she was born, where she lived, and then it stated her occupation. It was like homemaker or housewife. It was this woman who I had seen ranch for decades and be so proud of her work. And to see that erased on this sheet of paper by, well, minding kind people, I'm Sure. In the back of my mind I thought, man, if only she could have told her story, if there was more

Ryan Warner (37:28)

that could have been revealed about this remarkable life she led.

Lorena Davis (37:33)

Yes, absolutely, there was more to her. So when I ended up in grad school a few years later and I was looking around for a grant project, for a grant writing class, I cast around a few ideas and I tossed them out to my friends and colleagues. And everybody kept coming back to the idea of talking to women who worked in ranching. So that's what I submitted and ended up getting a fellowship for a collection that is going to be housed at the US Library of Congress. So the fact that these women's stories are there for anybody to access forever and they get to tell their stories in their own voice, so that was important to me and it was a pure pleasure to get to know these 12amazing women who are ranching in western Colorado.

Ryan Warner (38:16)

So the Library of Congress has this occupational folk life project that this will be documented as part of. And you know, there's a, a through line not only in your grandmother's story, but in the stories that you collected of twice the work that for women in ranching, it's the work plus, it's the job plus.

Lorena Davis (38:43)

Absolutely. So I did first of all look for women who had different demographic information at different ages. Some were married, some divorced, some never married, some with children, some without. But there was for many of them a big overlap of a house to run, perhaps, and then also the ranch. And sometimes the ranch is where the house is. And so you never really get away from your work. In addition to that, they also, many of them had, you know, day jobs off site. So when I just, I see the.

Ryan Warner (39:15)

That's unexpected to me. I think of like, isn't ranching enough?

Lorena Davis (39:19)

Well, not for these women. It's just amazing to me, you know, again, the productivity and the project management skills that if you're going to do this type of work, you have to be organized, you have to be driven, and most definitely, if you can't be that, you can't continue in ranching. So the people that I talked to were all highly productive and many of them juggling multiple roles.

Ryan Warner (39:44)

I'm really glad you spoke to some without children.

Lorena Davis (39:48)

I tried to avoid hitting some type of stereotype. It's like this is the representation of women who happen to ranch for a living. I really wanted different age, raising different animals, different situations, whether they were legacy ranchers or first gen ranchers, or didn't even own a ranch and are leasing property and different family situations to the most, you know, the best that I could discern. And then to just put a microphone in front of them and let them tell their stories in their own voice without a filter. And through that, you get this rich diversity of experience that adds up to what it takes to be successful in ranch.

Ryan Warner (40:27)

You put a microphone in front of Katharine Bedell of Grand Junction and asked what she wanted people to understand about ranching.

Katharine Bedell (40:35)

It's not an easy life, but I'm still doing it. I love it. You know, sometimes, yeah, it's hard. You have cows die or snowstorm comes unexpectedly and there's things to deal with. But the thing that I think it brings out in you is to know that you can cope with anything. It's like there's nothing you can't do.

Ryan Warner (40:55)

For many of these women, ranching is generational, though, of course, you spoke to some who have adopted it more recently. But on the generational front, let's hear from Sierra Westerman of Hotchkiss.

Sierra Westerman (41:08)

My legacy is following in my dad and my grandma's footsteps is just building and being better and being hard working people. So that's. I hope I can be half of the cowmen that my dad.

Ryan Warner (41:19)

Meanwhile, Alyssa Barsanti raises beef cattle in basalt. And when you interviewed her, her daughter was a baby. And Alyssa, very excited to raise her as a ranch kid.

Lorena Davis (41:31)

I think showing her the value of agriculture and the importance it plays in our community and our society will be

Jennifer Reich (41:38)

really powerful no matter how that plays out.

Ryan Warner (41:42)

No matter how that plays out. What pressure do these women face to keep the ranch in the fence?

Lorena Davis (41:48)

You know, in the case of Sierra Westerman, she was a third generation. Her grandmother started the cattle ranch. And through the generations, oftentimes there's dividing of assets, and that can tear apart a ranch for good. And they had gone through succession planning and then survival with their ranch, too. And to Sierra, she felt a dedication to her father and to her grandmother to continue to build on what they had built up. Because it can take decades in order to get the permits that you need, the knowledge that you need, the relationships that you need with others. And so it is a long game for many of these people. And for many of these ranchers, it was important to them to keep this ranch going.

Ryan Warner (42:38)

But of course, if they have children, though, that's a tremendous amount of pressure to place on a kid.

Lorena Davis (42:44)

It can be, but no one ever said, I expect my kids to take over the ranch. As a matter of fact, more often than not, there were situations where they Were trying to do some succession planning, and their children had gone off to do other things. And that's just how it was. They made their own choices. So then what happens with the ranch? Well, maybe it's going to go outside of the family, but you still want to find a buyer who will keep it together. And that was important, too. So I didn't hear any coercion in that way, other than a sense of, like, pride and respect. And this was be a great life. But people make different choices. And I heard, you know, respect and understanding of that.

Ryan Warner (43:20)

Do people still want to be ranchers, like, new people?

Lorena Davis (43:23)

Yes. And I look at somebody like Elissa Barsanti's experience, where she was in nutrition science, she was a dietitian, nutrition sciences, happened to take a class through the Aspen Institute about agriculture and realized this, this is the way that I want to live. If I think about a Venn diagram of all the differences in the interviews of the people I interviewed, I see, like, three overlaps in the center. One of them is like, a dedication to stewardship of land. The other is care of animals. And then the third is, you know, people who want to work outside, people who say, like, I could never work in an office all day. Right. All these people would say the same thing. Even though there is a lot of paperwork that has to be done, you can still get outside. And so then it becomes, man, this is a beautiful lifestyle, even with the hardships that come with it. And some of those hardships that were articulated is animals who get sick and who die. Right. That is a lot of responsibility.

Ryan Warner (44:24)

If you're just joining us, we're talking about Taking Stock Ranching Women of Colorado. It's an oral history project that will be added to the Library of Congress. And it comes from Lorena Davis, who's an assistant professor of mass communication at Colorado Mesa University. How doable is it to get into ranching? If you want to start at this

Lorena Davis (44:49)

point, though, I think people recognize that the cost of land is prohibitive for most people, and so that probably is the greatest barrier to entry. I point to Alyssa Barsan, who is doing something that may be the future of ranching, and that is she is leasing her graze lands from Pitkin county open space. So she herself does not own a ranch, but she runs chickens, turkeys, sheep and beef on leased land. And that way Pitkin county can keep that land open and in agriculture. And so these types of partnerships could be key to more people having access to ranching in the future.

Ryan Warner (45:32)

I do wonder how you Avoided over romanticizing this life. Was that a risk that you were worried about?

Lorena Davis (45:40)

That is it? You know, that's really interesting to speak to. Even though I was kind of a subdivision kid, I was, you know, around people in agriculture a lot. And so I didn't have this romantic notion about you get to ride your pony all day and, you know, the sun's shining and look at the little lamb hopping about. Right. It's like I had a little more insight than that. My dad was a horseshoe for several years. You know, I kind of went around and was around that girl. I was in 4H. I was around a farrier.

Ryan Warner (46:11)

He was a farrier.

Lorena Davis (46:12)

He was. That was his retirement plan when he got out of the Marine Corps. Most people's backs can't last very long in that job, and his didn't either.

Ryan Warner (46:22)

Yeah. So you didn't go in with any sense of that. Montrose rancher Lana Hot Tuft about her love of the land and of animal husbandry.

Katharine Bedell (46:31)

Once you get that in your soul, being in a city where you're walking around on concrete all the time just is not any kind of life for anybody to live.

Lorena Davis (46:43)

She lived in Austin, Texas, what I think would be a great town. Right. But, you know, she'd done it. She'd gone to the big city. And Lana's man, she's just salt of the earth.

Ryan Warner (46:53)

She.

Lorena Davis (46:54)

She's one of those ranching women. She not only ranched, she was a ranch manager for a long time. So she did everything from anything that needed to be done. Irrigation, welding, work on the tractor, work with the animals, anything that needed to be done, she did it all.

Ryan Warner (47:11)

Well, I feel like she's talking to me, the concrete walker here, but how much did you carry your grandmother with you during this work?

Lorena Davis (47:21)

So my grandma is a. She just was a fascinating person.

Ryan Warner (47:25)

I just want to say, Lorena, there's something I love about this. When you have spoken of her thus far, you switch between present and past tense.

Lorena Davis (47:36)

I think I do carry her with me, and so I do think of that present tense. I also. I was thinking about this the other day, too. It hadn't really occurred to me. She had four boys and no daughter, and I thought she would probably love that people were featuring women after a lifetime of raising four boys. She also was an unsentimental woman. Right. So I give her that. She was. But I think she also probably would have liked to have told her own story, without undercover, of being like the rancher's wife all the time and to just be the rancher so in that way, way, I hope that a little bit of that lives on.

Ryan Warner (48:16)

Thank you so much for talking with us.

Lorena Davis (48:19)

Thank you.

Ryan Warner (48:20)

Lorena Davis, assistant professor of mass communication at Colorado Mesa University. Her oral history project is taking stock Ranching Women of Colorado. The Library of Congress gave her a grant for it. And the interviews will join the Occupational Folks Project that is Colorado Matters for now, with thanks to this hard working crew. Sandy Batulga, Tyler Bender, Carl Bielick, Anthony Cotton, Pete Kramer, Andrea Dukakis, Zan Hucpechone.

Lorena Davis (48:55)

Matt Herz, Tom Hess, Michael Hughes, Pedro Lumbragno. Shane Rumsey, Haley Sanchez, Chandra Thomas, Thomas Whitfield.

Ryan Warner (49:05)

And I'm Ryan Warner. On Main street in Grand Junction. This is CPR News and krcc.