Bronson Removes Health Department’s ‘Baghdad Bob’ Video on COVID Testing
A poorly edited propaganda video published on the Facebook page of Mayor David Bronson's Anchorage Health Department (AHD) appears to have been deleted. The video, posted under a cloak of darkness at 9:02 pm on Tuesday, featured AHD Director Joseph Gerace telling residents that covid testing in the city of Anchorage was in a "better place" than it was two months ago.
The health department has not explained why it removed the popular video from its Facebook page, which had been viewed thousands of times. Yesterday, the Anchorage Daily News linked to the video, but the link no longer works.
A copy of the video was stashed away roughly 20 hours ago on the low-traffic YouTube channel of Anchorage Mayor David Bronson, perhaps to minimize the number of people who might view it while also quietly preserving the video as a matter of public record. The video does not appear on the mayor's Facebook page.
In the now-deleted video, Gerace provided a telephone number for the COVID-19 information line but noted that the call center was besieged by a high demand of callers seeking COVID testing.
Gerace also touted the Anchorage Covid Test website, which is well known to Anchorage residents. The website lists testing locations by hour and day. Residents have been using it to find testing locations since the previous administration of former Anchorage Mayor Austin Quinn Davidson.
But in an Anchorage Daily News article published yesterday, Gerace suggested that people had suddenly become bamboozled by the website they've used for several months and were looking at the wrong day for testing site information, causing confusion. Gerace offered this as an apparent theory in what appears to be an attempt to explain away anger and frustration expressed by those who say they've shown up to testing centers only to find them closed.
Gerace likely feels residents have suddenly become too dumb to read the dates and times listed on the website, and some residents appear to agree.
"Sounds like he [Gerace] was quickly and lamely looking for a place to hide when suddenly he found himself exposed and out in the open," wrote one Anchorage resident on Twitter. Another said that Gerace was not shifting blame but clearly stating that "the populace is too dumb to understand a website."
Anchorage resident Lara Imler, who recently had COVID-19 and who is still coping with the effects caused by the virus, wrote on Facebook that Gerace's comments suggesting people had suddenly become incapable of reading dates and times on the testing website were "perhaps the dumbest response from the administration" she has seen yet.
This post has been updated to reflect that a copy of the video was stashed away on Mayor Bronson's unpopular YouTube channel 20 hours ago. It has only been viewed twice since the video was published on the channel.
