Wally Nunn: Delco’s Health Department isn’t the success story Rosemarie Halt claims

Rosemarie Halt, Chair of the Delaware County Board of Health, recently wrote an op-ed in the Delco Daily Times offering a glowing assessment of the county’s newly created Health Department. Unfortunately, many of her claims don’t survive contact with the facts.

Childhood Vaccinations: The Numbers Are Going the Wrong Way

Halt touts that “childhood vaccinations are reaching more families.” The state’s own data tells a very different story. In 2020, before the Health Department existed, 96.5 percent of Delco kindergarteners were fully vaccinated. By 2024, the rate had fallen to 94.2 percent.

That drop is not trivial. For measles, a 95 percent vaccination rate is the minimum threshold to maintain herd immunity. Delco is now below that line — and worse, we currently rank last among the five Southeastern Pennsylvania counties. If vaccination rates have declined, they cannot reasonably be presented as a success story.

The Chester County Question

Halt also implies that Delaware County had to rely on the Chester County Health Department before 2022. So it is fair to ask: Did any of the money Delco paid Chester County end up tangled in the Chester County Health Department’s $13 million pandemic-era scandal?

Given the turmoil and mismanagement revealed in that case, the public deserves to know what exactly we paid for — and whether the services received justified the cost. Chester County’s experience during Covid hardly makes the case for importing their model to Delco.

Delco’s Covid Outcomes Were Not an Argument for Creating a New Bureaucracy

Halt argues that Delco’s lack of a health department harmed residents during the pandemic. Once again, the data suggest otherwise.

A Pennsylvania Department of Health report released mid-pandemic found that nearly 90 percent of Delco’s Covid deaths were nursing home residents or staff. Nursing homes are state-regulated, not county-regulated. A county health department has no authority over them.

When you isolate non-nursing-home deaths per 100,000 residents, the comparisons speak for themselves:

• Montgomery County: 6
• Chester County: 9
• Delaware County (no health department): 12
• Bucks County: 18
• Philadelphia: 61

Delco — despite having no health department — performed better than Bucks and Philadelphia, and only slightly worse than Chester and Montgomery.

Considering Delco’s demographics — the second-highest population density in the state, the highest percentage of African-American residents outside Philadelphia, and an older-than-average population — the real question is why Halt is portraying Delco’s pandemic performance as a justification for a department that likely wouldn’t have changed the outcome.

Halt also, conveniently, did not mention the Health Department’s devious attempt to take credit for hundreds of thousands of vaccine shots received by Delco residents — shots that were delivered by CVS, Rite Aid, and other providers. These providers gave the shots out in every county in the state, not just the six that had county health departments. In the final analysis, the Health Department may have given a few thousand shots at their Yeadon facility.

Which brings up another question: why is their facility in Yeadon? Getting to the borough on the county’s eastern edge by public transportation is arduous. Yeadon is more convenient to Philadelphia than it is to most Delco residents.

Public Health Kiosks and “Doing Delco”

Halt praises the Health Department’s new “public health kiosks,” including one in Upper Darby and one at Delaware County Community College. If the purpose is simply to distribute free condoms, taxpayers might reasonably question whether this requires a multimillion-dollar bureaucracy.

Even more eyebrow-raising is the department’s past initiative “Doing Delco,” which offered home delivery of ten condoms to any resident. This hardly rises to the level of “robust public health infrastructure.”

What Johns Hopkins Recommended — and What Halt Doesn’t Mention

Halt writes that “health professionals had long advocated” for a county health department. Except that’s not what the county’s most authoritative study said.

In 2010, Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health — one of the premier public-health institutions in the nation — conducted a comprehensive review at the request of County Council. Their conclusion:

• The county already had the necessary public-health capabilities through state resources and local hospitals.
• The county’s role should be coordination, not building a new bureaucracy.
• A standalone health department was not recommended, in part because of its cost burden to taxpayers.

That study didn’t fit the narrative, so Halt simply ignores it.

“No County Tax Dollars Were Spent”—Technically True, Functionally Misleading

Halt’s final claim is that the health department hasn’t used county tax dollars. Technically correct. But here’s what she is omitting:

• The department was built with temporary federal pandemic funds — about $5 million of which will run out next year.
• Unless the county cuts the department’s budget by one-third, taxpayers will be asked to foot the bill.
• This comes on top of the county’s $95 million increase in county spending and steep real-estate tax hikes over the past several years.

Halt and her elitist friends will, by this time next year, have  ravaged the taxpayers to the tune of $100,000,000 a year. If that’s not enough, consider an additional $400.000,000 of debt, all of which will be repaid by the taxpayer over the next twenty years. Those numbers are atrocious. My bet is that there is even more to come.