When Politicians begin to Whine

[August 7, 2022]  The state of Minnesota is at the center of the debate over the destructive policies of Democrat governors that put into place draconian measures to supposedly save us from COVID-19.  Tough questions are being asked of those governors and their medical advisory teams.  It looks like those questions are just too hard to think about.  In the case of Minnesota, their Department of Health commissioner (a politician) Jan Malcolm claims PTSD from the experience.  The big whine is starting.

At PowerLineBlog.com, Scott Johnson was front and center in the controversy.

I had tuned in to the briefings following [Governor] Walz’s March 25, 2020 emergency order that arbitrarily shut down the state. Following the data, I saw that 80 percent of the deaths attributed to Covid by MDH occurred in long-term care facilities. I sought an answer to the question why the state was being shut down because of a crisis in long-term care about which the authorities themselves remained silent.

Yesterday, Minnesota’s Star Tribune editorializes about a JAMA study on undefined “harassment” of public health officials, such a Jan Malcolm.

In an interview this week, Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) Commissioner Jan Malcolm said the study is tough to read. “I’ll just be really honest with you, I’m having a little PTSD,” she said, referring to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kevin Roche, at healthyskeptic speaks about in response to Jan Macolm’s whine.

Your policies and actions caused the following, and much more:

1. You forced thousands of nursing home residents to be isolated from what little social contact they had. These residents then gave up, developed what is euphemistically referred to as “failure to thrive” syndrome and died.  You compiled one of the worst records in the country in regard to nursing home deaths and serious illness.

2. Your constant harping on danger and safety led hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans to miss needed health care, including child immunizations, leading to sharp rises in serious disease and to increases in death from causes such as dementia, heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. We will pay the price for this terror campaign for years to come.

3. Your policies caused a sharp increase in deaths from drug and alcohol abuse. You supported open-border policies which allowed enormous quantities of fentanyl and other dangerous drugs to flood into our communities, you supported destroying effective police forces to stop this flow of drugs and you have done nothing, absolutely nothing to limit the use of these drugs.  Adolescents, young adults and minorities are most at risk due to your policies and inaction.

4. You supported and enforced school closures which destroyed the educational and social lives of Minnesota’s children, and led to thousands of minority children simply dropping out of school.

5. You supported lockdowns which disrupted all Minnesotans lives, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the closure of tens of thousands of businesses, resulting in financial and mental health distress.

6. You constantly provided misleading and incomplete information to the public and continue to do so to this day. You have been more interested in giving out only what data supports your messages as opposed to the truth.  You suppressed a study on the ineffectiveness of masks.  You refused to release communications with teachers’ unions showing that your school closure policies were just payback for campaign contributions to Walz and Democrats.  You hid data showing that most hospitalizations attributed to CV-19 were not primarily for treatment of that condition.  You supported crazy approaches to attributing deaths to CV-19.  You continue to refuse to provide full data on breakthrough infections and reinfections that would allow an honest assessment of vaccine effectiveness and immunity from prior infection.

7. You lied about vaccine effectiveness and supported vaccine mandates which worsened health care staffing problems and led to worse health care. Your policies caused many workers to lose jobs even though they were no more likely to get infected or to transmit than were persons who were vaccinated.

We can at least conclude that health officials from the state of Minnesota (and other Democratically run states) are guilty of spreading misleading and false information about COVID-19.

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