“The Human Psyche Was Not Built for This” – By Marilyn W. Thompson and Jenny Deam, research by Mollie Simon, photo illustrations by Kitra Cahana, special to ProPublica (ProPublica) / Sept 6, 2022
How Republicans in Montana hijacked public health and brought a hospital to the brink
Vicky Rae Byrd had a sinking feeling.
As she scrolled through her phone on election night, her pick for president — Joe Biden — seemed to have a slight edge. Byrd was too stressed to turn on the local news. Her husband sat down with her in their living room, and the couple settled on some sitcom.
Montana had long voted Republican in presidential elections. But it had a Democratic governor for the past 16 years, and that was almost certain to end. Ending with it, Byrd feared, would be the state’s aggressive response to COVID-19.
Byrd, 58, with long silver hair, had been sounding early warnings as director of the Montana Nurses Association, which lobbies for the state’s 18,000 nurses, many of them unionized. She’d been a nurse herself for 33 years, most of them at St. Peter’s Health in Helena, working in pediatric cancer.
CONTINUE > https://www.propublica.org/article/montana-covid-response-pushed-hospital-to-brink
