Editor,

Scott Smith’s May 21 letter to the editor attempted to impugn the Island County Health Board’s Dr. Brad Thomas, but his two-bullet reasoning displayed under-informed familiarity with medical research and, hence, fell well short of import. But, he did hoist the issue of Jill Johnson’s grilling of Dr. Thomas.

And yes, it was a courtroom-type grilling that Dr. Thomas effectively responded to objectively, accurately and with a good measure of restraint.

Unlike the doctor, Jill’s intent came across clearly as the opposite — i.e., something more like a prima donna who, after hearing a brief and usually cut-short response, was then armed and ready to denounce the medical research as a fraud.

The tone was embarrassingly shrill and disrespectful.

It was sad to witness an elected official displaying such an obvious agenda in which reasoned listening and genuine pursuit of knowledge were nowhere to be found, displaced instead by an agenda and a vision in which she presumed to have sufficient credentials to be the ultimate judge of the medical and epidemiological efficacy of Dr. Thomas’s cut-short answers.

I felt embarrassed for her.

COER is not interested in a take-down of Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. It is simply pushing hard on a very obstinate and entrenched old-island ideology: “The Navy gets whatever they want.”

That’s not cutting it now — not with the millennials or young parents who don’t want to expose their children to toxic noise, and not with those of us who lived the Vietnam era.

There are real and easy solutions to this needless brouhaha that do not involve base closure: Move the touch-and-go’s away from intimacy with civilian life.

Ken Pickard

Coupeville

Ken Pickard is president of the anti-noise group Citizens of Ebey’s Reserver, or COER.