Utah plastic surgeon issued vaccination cards to patients he didn’t vaccinate, then dumped the vaccine down the drain.
I’m genuinely curious, and I’d love to see a followup, as to how many of those people that thought they were outsmarting the rest of us, are still alive and covid free.
Sidenote, and I’ve mentioned this before, it always seems funny to me that people are buying and selling these fake vax cards, meanwhile, even some dark web markets banned them.
I wonder, if one of those people died from covid, if the doctor can be charged with manslaughter.
If he fake vaccinated people who wanted to be vaccinated, I would hope that would be attempted murder charges.
Here the adults were all cooperating antivaxers. But it appears that he did fake vaccinate minors with saline, with the collusion of antivax parents. This seems to go a step beyond a situation where a parent just won’t let a minor get vaccinated, because a minor at least knows the situation and can try to circumvent their parents’ wishes. Here both parents and this surgeon were colluding to deceive the minor into believing they were vaccinated.
Can he (and the the parents) be charged if the minor is subsequently harmed by COVID?
I swear Arizona is living up to its rep of Florida of the west …so much dumb here
Oof. Carving it up in the sublots of five houses is so shitty.
Ironic that a village in a desert is named “Rio Verde”, which translates to “Green River”. Ain’t no river there, and there ain’t much green, either.
Yeah, the beginning of the article is misleading - I got the impression at first that there was a mains connection from Scottsdale that got cut off. But they never had a mains connection - they were always getting water delivered by tanker truck into storage tanks. It’s just that the tankers can no longer fill up in Scottsdale.
This makes me less sympathetic to the homeowners. It’s not like this is coming completely out of left field - they knew they were buying a home in the desert without a mains water supply or a well, and recently after a well known decades-long drought. I feel like lack of due diligence on the risks of tanker supply is really on them.
I don’t think it’s possible to prove that they’d have lived if they had the vaccine. It’s not like having a vaccine gives you a 100% chance of not dying from the illness the way that “not being stabbed” gives you a 100% chance of not bleeding out from being stabbed.
Maybe reckless endangerment. But even then, he didn’t suck the vaccine out of them, he just helped them fraudulently claim to be vaccinated. They were just as vaccine-free as they were before his fake vaccine cards were given.
The closest equivalent I can think of would be a guy making fake concealed weapon permits for people… If someone he gave a permit to shot someone, he wouldn’t be criminally responsible for the shooting itself because he didn’t even give them a gun. Maybe conspiracy at most. Which this plastic surgeon was also charged with, I note.
(I’m not a lawyer.)
From the article:
Some say they know how it might look to outsiders. Yes, they bought homes in the Sonoran desert. But they ask, are they such outliers?
“If your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”
– all too often, the answer to this seems to be “Sure!”
Also from the same article:
To prevent unsustainable development in a desert state, Arizona passed a law in 1980 requiring subdivisions with six or more lots to show proof that they have a 100-year water supply.
But developers in Rio Verde Foothills have been sidestepping the rule by carving larger parcels into sections with four or five houses each, creating the impression of a miniature suburbia, but one that did not need to legally prove it had water. [ . . . ]
Thomas Galvin, a county supervisor who represents the area, says there’s not much the county can do if builders split their parcels into five lots or less to get around the water supply requirement. “Our hands are tied,” he said.
No, your hands are not tied. You need to rewrite your subdivision ordinance to state that if the parcel’s been previously divided within the past X number of years (pick a high enough figure for X to make the tactic uneconomical), the sixth lot including the lots in any such previous division triggers whatever restrictions are required on 6+ lot subdivisions.
Subdivision laws are written like that all the time. If Arizona state law for some reason forbids that, then it needs to be re-written at the state level; but my guess is that it can also be done at the county or maybe municipal level.
– just checked. Apparently in Arizona subdivisions are regulated at the county level if not “in a municipality”.
A.R.S. § 11-806.01(A) (“The county board of supervisors shall regulate the subdivision of all lands within its corporate limits, except subdivisions which are regulated by municipalities.”)
I did a little satellite view of Rio Verde and it looks like Desert McMansionville with plenty of pools to go along with their two golf course.
You picked the correct thread for that article!
I would call it assisted suicide.
As for No Rio No Verde, they may be stupid, but in a lot of older towns, such as the freethinking village of Apache Junction, hauling your own water has always been the Way Things Are Done. The lots are larger there, so you can park your camper(s), your tractor, your non-running cars, and your water trailer.
Very good points!
– not sure they apply to that particular case, though.
When my kid was little, we passed a subdivision being built, named “Fox Grove”. He piped up from the back seat “That’s because they chased out all the foxes and bulldozed the grove.”
He tried his theory a few more times. Seemed pretty much like a rule: the name of a subdivision reflects what they don’t offer. And usually what they got rid of.
No, but it just further proves that there is an Xkcd for every situation.
True!
I used to live in the Antelope Valley.
We approved a subdivision name Elk Run.
My boss (at the time) told them that they achieved that. Sure aren’t any elk there now.
I was very impressed, a few years ago, when I saw an “Oak Cliff Drive” in a nearby suburb, and there was in fact an oak tree growing right next to it, and the road did, indeed, end at a cliff.