Life-and-Death Questions for Governor Whitmer Remain Unanswered
Why Did Whitmer Reject Science, Data, Experts Urging Her to Keep COVID-19 Out of Nursing Homes? Why Won’t State Release Data?
LANSING, MI, June 30, 2020 – The Michigan Freedom Fund today asked Governor Gretchen Whitmer to be more transparent with press and the public and to release long-requested and critical data surrounding the state’s decision to move patients with COVID-19 into the state’s nursing homes and assisted living facilities, among the population most vulnerable to the virus.
Important questions Governor Whitmer has the opportunity to answer include:
1) How many infections and deaths have taken place in Michigan assisted living facilities?
2) Will Governor Whitmer release the data showing deaths by facility and date, as well as the dates when patients who’d tested positive for COVID-19 were moved into nursing home and assisted living facilities?
3) Asked yesterday by Stephen Henderson on WDET about her policy of sending patients with COVID-19 into the state’s nursing homes and assisted living facilities, Governor Whitmer claimed:
“If I could go back in a time machine with the knowledge we have today three months ago, would I have made some decisions differently? Yes.”
What specific decisions related to her nursing home and assisted living facility policy would she make differently? Why, specifically (based on what science, data, or other information)?
4) Evidence conclusively showed before Michigan’s first COVID-19 infection that the virus was particularly deadly for seniors, but the Governor claims she’s “learning more” about the virus every day.
Did Governor Whitmer not know in March, when she instituted her nursing home policy, what scientists and doctors had already proven definitively, and reported globally?
5) If the Governor is basing her decisions on “science and data,” why has she convened a new nursing home task force to examine nursing home policies? What does she hope her political task force could tell her about science and data that scientists, physicians, Melissa Samuel, President and CEO of the Health Care Association of Michigan, and other experts haven’t already told her, repeatedly?
6) Governor Whitmer is a Lansing-native. Protestors marched yesterday on the state Capitol to demand the resignation of Mayor Andy Schor, and that the state “defund the police.” Does Whitmer support calls from social justice advocates that Mayor Andy Schor resign because of his handling of social justice issues in the Capital City?
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