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Dr. Mark Levine retires as Vermont’s health commissioner this week after an eight year tenure marked by historic events. Dr. Levine is best known as the steady hand guiding Vermont’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which by many measures was one of the most successful in the nation. Vermont had the second lowest Covid fatality rate, after Hawaii. According to the Vermont Department of Health, 1,283 people died from the Covid pandemic in Vermont.

During the dark days of lockdown in 2020 and 2021, Dr. Levine stood alongside Gov. Phil Scott and reassured anxious Vermonters about how to stay safe, the need for masking and social distancing, and the critical importance of vaccinations. His grandfatherly baritone voice conveyed wisdom and compassion.

In announcing Dr. Levine’s retirement, Gov. Scott said, “I will be forever grateful for his advice and counsel over the years, but especially during the pandemic, as he appeared with me daily at press conferences during those difficult days, giving much comfort to Vermonters as our very own ‘Country Doc’.”

Sen. Peter Welch said that Dr. Levine “helped Vermont through those incredibly challenging times, and saved many lives.” 

Prior to Dr. Levine’s appointment as health commissioner in 2017, he worked as a primary care physician and as a professor and associate dean at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, where he still teaches.

Dr. Levine, 71, steps away from health care leadership at a fraught and uncertain moment. Public health and science itself have come under unprecedented attack by the Trump administration. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the country’s newly appointed secretary of Health and Human Services, has been derided for being a conspiracy theorist and one of the top purveyors of medical misinformation. This week, Kennedy announced the layoffs of 10,000 health workers and $11 billion in cuts to public health grants dolled out to states. This includes a $7 million cut in aid to Vermont that state health officials said would “negatively impact public health in our state.”

All of this comes as measles is infecting unvaccinated children in the U.S. in what is already being described as the worst outbreak of this century.

Dr. Levine reflected on how Vermont compared to other states in managing the Covid pandemic. “Our economy looks like many of the states that had far worse outcomes from Covid and prioritized their economy more in terms of keeping a lot of sectors open. When you look at the bottom line in the end, our economic status and theirs don’t look very different, yet our public health status looks much, much better. And I’m going to hang my hat on that as very, very important for the way we approached the pandemic here in Vermont.”

“You know, there isn’t a hell of a lot I would have done differently, to be honest,” said Levine.

Levine insisted that there are not many critics who say “you shouldn’t have had vaccines. You shouldn’t have masked us up. You shouldn’t have closed down things. When you close them down, they kind of understand that the major outcome was that Vermont fared much better as a state than many other states. So it’s hard for me to have too many regrets.”

Why did Vermont fare better than other states?

“We come from a culture here in Vermont where people look out for their family, they look out for their community, and they work collaboratively,” said Levine. “The second thing is that in public health, we always say, be first, be right, be credible. And the communication that the governor and I and the rest of the team had was frequent, it was with integrity about what we knew and what we didn’t yet know, and it was with great transparency … revealing the data every time and showing what we were responding to.”

Levine leaves his post with deep concern about what lies ahead for public health. “When disinformation comes from the top, whether it be the secretary of (Health and Human Services) or the president, it has an impact and it makes our job much harder.”

Levine noted that even when Trump administration officials are trying to control the measles epidemic, “they always manage to sort of agree, but then say the wrong thing and let you know that they really aren’t completely aligned, which is a problem I am very concerned about.”

Levine says that federal budget cuts could have a serious impact on Vermont, where “40 percent of my budget is related to federal grant money.”

If the latest cuts “are a signal of what’s to come, then they are of tremendous concern. And the problem is, of course, we’re not seeing broad visions and huge strategic plans with discrete timelines associated. We’re seeing abrupt moves by the federal government that basically say, today your grants were stopped, and by the way, we’re interested in chronic disease prevention. But they haven’t actually shown us the vision and the timeline and what the resources will be and (where they) will come from.”

Dr. Levine said of his legacy, “People will always remember Covid, and I’m fine with that, but I hate for that to be the defining moment because public health is so much more than that. One thing I’m very proud of is work we’ve done to protect our children’s health.”

“I’d like to be remembered that we’ve now turned the curve on the opioid overdose death rate, and it’s clearly on the way down. It’s not a mission accomplished. There’s still a lot of work to be done. But at least it’s going in the right direction.”

As he retires, Levine lamented the rise in the “great anti-science bias” and the movement of those who are “vaccine resistant, or at least hesitant.”

“We do in public health as much as we can to provide what we consider not the alternative viewpoint but the actual evidence-based viewpoint. But the recipients of that have to be willing to receive that information, and we’re in a time where many people get their information from one set of resources and they won’t veer from those resources to others. So it’s a challenging time for public health, indeed.”

A Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University who was detained by federal agents in Massachusetts last week — and whose case has since drawn national attention — was later taken to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in St. Albans and held there overnight, lawyers for the federal government said in a court filing Tuesday.

After detaining Rümeysa Öztürk at ICE’s field office on Gricebrook Road in St. Albans the night of March 25, court records state, officials took her to Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport the next morning, where she was flown to Alexandria, Louisiana.

From there, Öztürk was transported to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana, court records show — where she has been held since, The Boston Globe and other outlets reported.  

Several Boston-area news outlets reported on the court filing late Tuesday and described it in articles. The filing appears to exist in the federal government’s online court records system, but was not publicly viewable on the website Wednesday morning. However, Joshua J. Friedman, a freelance writer and editor, posted records that appeared to match on the social media platform Bluesky late Tuesday. 

Officials took Öztürk first to New Hampshire, then to Vermont, shortly after she was arrested by masked agents while walking on a street near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts around 5:30 p.m. on March 25, court records show.

Attorneys representing Öztürk, who was living in the U.S. on a student visa, have argued that she was wrongly targeted for exercising her rights to free speech. Last March, Öztürk co-wrote an op-ed for Tufts’ student newspaper that criticized university leaders for their response to demands that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had decided to revoke Öztürk’s visa because she was part of the pro-Palestinian movement on college campuses last year. Recent reporting by the Globe, though, found that Öztürk played a limited role in the movement on Tufts’ campus. 

In response to a request from her lawyers the night of March 25, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered that Öztürk be kept in Massachusetts. 

But in Tuesday’s filing, prosecutors representing President Donald Trump’s administration argued that the judge did not have jurisdiction over the case because, at the time of the court’s ruling, Öztürk was already located in Vermont.

According to the court filing, ICE officials arrested Öztürk around 5:25 p.m., shortly after which she was taken to Methuen, Massachusetts and Lebanon, New Hampshire, before arriving at the St. Albans Field Office at 10:28 p.m. The judge’s order was issued at 10:55 p.m. that same night, court records state.

At 4 a.m. the following morning, the filings state, ICE officials transported Öztürk to the airport in Burlington, and she departed on a flight around 5:30 a.m. 

ICE transported Öztürk to its St. Albans field office because it does not have detention facilities in Massachusetts for women, the government argued. 

“ICE routinely transfers individuals arrested in one state to facilities in other states because of operational considerations such as bedspace and designation of risk categories,” the attorneys wrote.

A spokesperson for Gov. Phil Scott did not immediately return a request for comment. ICE did not return multiple requests for comment in recent weeks regarding their operations in Vermont and use of the Burlington airport.

Shea Mahoney, a Vermont resident, was on Delta flight DL1382 on March 19 out of the Burlington airport when she witnessed what she believed may have been a transfer of federal immigration detainees.

“There was an elderly Hispanic woman in a wheelchair, a younger Hispanic woman, and an African woman in Muslim headdress who carried a few belongings in a mesh bag that had a U.S. Border Patrol and Customs and U.S. Department of Homeland Security tag on it,” Mahoney wrote to VTDigger. “They were traveling with two men who were dressed in plainclothes but had military issue backpacks and seemed to be escorting them.”

Mahoney said she did not hear explicitly that the passengers were being deported or held by immigration authorities. Still, the events sparked concern.

“It set off alarm bells,” Mahoney said. “ I really can’t think of any other scenario that would explain the situation. It was pretty shocking.”

The early morning Delta flight is a regular route to Atlanta. Flight booking websites indicate the flight is likely the first leg of the fastest commercial route to Alexandria, Louisiana, where court records indicate ICE transferred Öztürk.

Joe Magee, deputy chief of staff for Burlington’s mayor, said he had no information regarding federal immigration authorities using the airport, which the city operates, and neither did the airport’s director. 

“We don’t really have control over the federal agencies using the airport,” Magee said. 

In an interview on Wednesday, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, described the present state of federal immigration action as “a waking nightmare.”

The federal government is “deliberately pushing a collapse of the boundary between police activity, the border activity that’s going on, and civilian activity,” Baruth said, adding that lawmakers were working on legislation to protect immigrants in Vermont from the “horrific” situation unfolding. 

Thomas Cartwright, a refugee advocate who has spent years tracking ICE deportation flights, said it’s extremely challenging to verify whether immigration authorities utilized a commercial flight to transfer detainees. He also said he was not aware of ICE-chartered planes flying out of the Burlington airport. 

A Vermont Department of Corrections spokesperson said the department had no record of lodging Öztürk.

This story will be updated.

WHITEHALL, N.Y. (WCAX) – A New York man has been charged with transporting a minor across state lines to engage in sexual activity.

According to court records, 33-year-old Ian Blochwitz of Buffalo met a 12-year-old on an anonymous chat platform. Then, in February of 2023, Blochwitz drove a rental car from Buffalo to Vermont to meet them.

He allegedly took the victim to a short-term rental in Whitehall, New York, where he engaged in sexual activity with them.

Blochwitz faces up to a lifetime of imprisonment if convicted.

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