A Tennessee county embroiled in arguments over whether to mask kids is considering adding a Pfizer lobbyist to its school board.
Williamson County School Board Member Brad Fiscus first announced that he was stepping down from his position in August following months of advocating for anti-science mask mandates for schoolchildren. Fiscus blamed his resignation on his family’s decision to relocate after his wife Michelle Fiscus, Tennessee’s former top vaccine official, was fired for promoting a memo on a state law that reportedly allowed kids to get vaccinated without their parents’ consent. She was later ridiculed for demanding a government investigation into a dog muzzle she ordered to her office and claimed was sent as a threat.
Up until last week, 10 candidates were vying to take over Brad Fiscus’s position following months of parental complaints in the district over COVID-19 restrictions and mandates. Because Fiscus served from Williamson County District 4, the District 4 county commissioners are tasked with nominating his replacement (although other commissioners may nominate candidates as well). District 4 commissioners Gregg Lawrence and Chad Story officially nominated Josh Brown, who is the national vice president of state government relations for Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that created one of the COVID-19 shots, to the school board on Thursday.
“Josh brings to the board many years of Fortune 500 senior level executive management experience. [He] is a very humble man with a measured temperament and highly principled character,” Lawrence and Story said in an announcement.
Brown’s ties to the company that has made millions of dollars off of vaccine sales fueled by private and government-endorsed vaccine coercion are not lost on his competitors nor parents in the district who fought hard against Fiscus’s willingness to embrace a strict COVID fear-based regime. BioNTech and Pfizer recently announced that they will begin to seek approval for COVID-19 shots for children. And while Brown has yet to comment on his controversial ties to the vaccine creators or say if it influenced his interest in being on the school board, it is clear that he maintains a deep commitment to the pharmaceutical industry.
As Gary Humble, the founder and director of Tennessee Stands, noted, Brown “serves as the state lead for Pfizer to a number of external organizations including the National Governors Association, PhRMA, and BIO.”
“He also serves on Pfizer’s US Global Innovative Pharma Sales extended leadership team in his role as government affairs liaison to the commercial business. He represents Pfizer on the PhRMA State Section, where he recently served as Chair, and currently serves on the BIO State Government Relations Committee,” Humble wrote.
Brown also sits on the board of California Life Sciences, which plans to dedicate at least $3 million to promote “The Racial & Social Equity Initiative” which is designed “to do more for the historically excluded Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) populations in California.”
Brown previously did not answer the Tennessee Star’s questions about his positions on “COVID-19 mask mandates and whether public schools at the K-12 level should teach Critical Race Theory.”
The Williamson County Board of Commissioners is scheduled to officially vote on Brown on Monday night.
