A little🧵to provide some context about life in a red-ish suburb of a purple state vs. deep blue progressive Seattle.

For those of you who don’t already know my story, I was born and raised in Seattle, never living more than 10 miles from Downtown Seattle in my life, until August of 2020. 1/ I’m a 4th generation small business owner & entrepreneur and I started my company when I was in the business school at the @UW. My company is the 4th one my family founded and operates, and we are located in the heart of Seattle.

(For the inevitable haters, I did all of this with zero family support or outside capital, and I paid my own way through college too). 2/

There’s been a pattern of lies coming straight from @azbethlewis over the past 3 months. Her claim of nearly 142,000 signatures was just the latest. After a weekend of hard work at the Secretary of State’s office, the petition count is final and it’s only 8175 total. 1/ Through public disclosure requests, we’ve sampled the petitions which average 10.2 signatures each, not the 13.9 claimed by @arizona_sos. Our estimate of their actual signature count is roughly 83,000, or less than 60% of what they claimed. 2/

And @arizona_sos wonders why we don’t trust public schools? It’s stories like this. We heard SO MANY of them as we were working through the process of getting a diagnosis and an intensive intervention for our 2e dyslexic son. “You have a private school kid” we heard.

https://twitter.com/clarkrimsza/status/1564039812457197568

Our neuropsychologist and dyslexia center director repeatedly said what a disaster our local public school district was for dyslexic kids. “Stay away” they said, “your child probably wouldn’t even qualify for an IEP because of his giftedness”.

Since I poke the hornets' nest every time I tweet about getting Covid, here's another one:

I got vaccinated because they said it was 95% effective against transmission.

That was pure and utter bullshit. It was hope/lies/fraud.

I should have ready the Pfizer study myself. 1/ At the time, I was pretty darn sure I'd already had it. I had all the symptoms. Temp of 103+ for 4 days in Jan 2020. Dry cough that lasted for weeks. Intermittent racing heartbeat that lasted for months.

As soon as I could get an antibody test, I took it.

It was negative. 2/

I tested positive for SARS-CoV2 last Sunday. It’s my 3rd time having it, and I’m fully vaccinated (which I now believe was a huge mistake).

To placate those still terrified of Covid (which seems to be about 20% of Seattleites) I stayed home for 5 days, per CDC guidelines.

1/ Yet at day 5, I was still testing positive for the virus. In fact, the rapid tests lit up faster and with a darker line on day 5 than when I first tested. By day 5, my fully vaxxed wife was also testing positive, and was pretty sick and symptomatic (fever, cough, etc.).

2/

The state of #education in #Seattle currently:

@SeaPubSchools: We don't have enough bus drivers to get your kids to school, so we are going to stagger start times between 7:30 and 9:30.

Sorry not sorry, parents who work and kids who play sports. (1/)

westseattleblog.com/2022/04/school… Also @SeaPubSchools - we don't have enough Narcan to handle all of the kids who are OD'ing at school. Two doses per school isn't enough for any given day.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with school closures or insane Covid policies, even though overdoses are "rising". (2/)

Since I wasn't granted my one minute to speak at the WA Board of Health meeting, here's what I wanted to say, and all of you deserve to hear. 1/ Members of the Board of Health:

To very briefly introduce myself, my name is Kevin Gemeroy, and I’m a 4th generation West Seattleite, local entrepreneur and small business owner, a Covid data guru, and Covid policy refugee. 2/

I tested positive for SARS-COV2 today. It’s my second time having it. And I’m double-vaccinated.

I got it at a kid’s birthday party. Or from my kids’ school. Or on an airplane.

I actually don’t really know or care, and nobody is to blame for it, including me. 1/ My first time I contracted was in late-December 2019. That time was much worse. I barely left my bedroom for a week. It was never confirmed because we didn’t yet know about Covid, although later surveillance testing showed it was floating around Seattle in Nov. 2019. 2/