Orange County has barred county health officials from providing COVID-19 updates at a county supervisor’s news conferences.

The briefings held by Supervisor Katrina Foley had become one of the few sources of regular COVID-19 information in California’s third-most populous county after the Board of Supervisors stopped providing updates by its top health official at its meetings and suspended press briefings by health officials for several months.

In response, Foley launched on Aug. 9 her own regular COVID-19 news conferences. On Thursday, however, the chair and vice chair of the Board of Supervisors — Andrew Do and Doug Chaffee — ordered county officials to stop participating in the briefings.

Do, in a statement, said the news conferences were political stunts that provided information that was already available. Foley said the regular health updates were needed to combat misinformation and sound the alarm about the Delta variant and its impact on hospitals, which have been strained by the numbers of COVID-19 patients entering emergency rooms.

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