June 3, 2021

USA: Commie Funded Michigan Governor Whitmer Disallowed Groups Of More Than 6 People To Be Seated Together At A Restaurant. She Was Caught Disregarding Her Own Rule. Nursing Home Scandal.

The Washington Examiner
written by Mike Brest, Breaking News Reporter
Monday May 24, 2021

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer apologized after she was caught violating one of her own coronavirus-related orders.

On May 15, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services issued an order disallowing groups of more than six people to be seated together at a restaurant, and each party has to be separated by six feet. However, the governor was caught disregarding that rule on Saturday.

Whitmer was spotted at the Landshark Bar & Grill in East Lansing. A photograph of the group with Whitmer showing tables pushed tougher and no masks being worn was briefly posted on social media. Her chief operating officer, Tricia Foster, was also at the event.

"Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been committed to following public health protocols," Whitmer said Sunday in a statement. "Yesterday, I went with friends to a local restaurant. As more people arrived, the tables were pushed together. Because we were all vaccinated, we didn't stop to think about it.”

"In retrospect, I should have thought about it. I am human,” she added. “I made a mistake, and I apologize."

Ted Goodman, spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party, said, "For Gov. Whitmer, it's rules for thee but not for me," according to the Detroit News.

Whitmer has faced strong criticism from conservatives for her handling of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, in part because this weekend's violation wasn't the first time she has been accused of not following her own policies.

On March 12, Whitmer traveled on a private plane to Florida to visit her ill father, returning to Michigan on March 15, despite guidance against traveling.

A number of other Democratic politicians, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, have also been caught violating the coronavirus restrictions.

Last week, Whitmer announced outdoor capacity limits will be lifted June 1, when indoor capacity limits will also be raised to 50%. Indoor capacity limits and the state's broad mask mandate will be fully lifted July 1 for those who received the vaccine.
The Daily Mail, UK
written by Ross Ibbetson
Thursday May 27, 2021

America's coronavirus nursing home crisis deepened today amid claims that Michigan's death toll could be double the official figure and that Andrew Cuomo used the Speaker to help hide New York's cover-up.

Cuomo and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have been under intense scrutiny since August when Trump said they 'issued COVID-19 orders that may have resulted in deaths of elderly nursing home residents.'

New York has now acknowledged that at least 15,000 long-term care residents died, compared to a figure of 8,700 it reported as late as January - though the extent of the cover-up continues to unravel.

Now it appears that Michigan may have similarly under-counted its care home death toll.

The health department has recorded more than 19,000 Covid-19 deaths, of which at least 5,600 were in care homes.

But the department relies on an 'honor system' where care homes self-report their coronavirus fatalities.

Another 6,945 Covid-19 deaths are classified vaguely as 'vital records reviews' – these are totted up by health officials going through death certificates.

'This is where the problem begins,' according to Charlie LeDuff for Deadline Detroit.

In a sample selection of 1,468 vital records from March to June 2020, 648 Covid deaths were traced back to nursing homes – that's 44 percent.

'Apply 44 percent to the nearly 7,000 vital records and there may be another 3,000 deaths of the institutionalized elderly unaccounted for,' LeDuff writes.

'The true number of pandemic deaths inside Michigan's elder care centers may never be known. But our analysis shows that the Covid death toll may be 100 percent higher than the state reports.'

When asked why Michigan was not conducting their own audits of the 'vital records' to find whether the dead included nursing home residents, the department of health said it was 'too time consuming.'

In a statement to Deadline Detroit, Gretchen Whitmer's health department said: 'That is not a review that we are able to do regularly due to how time-consuming it is and the amount of resources we need to devote to doing this.'

The statement added: 'Even when we do the manual review that is needed to link hospital deaths to long-term-care facility residents, the results are still substantially incomplete ... If the facility resident is transferred to a hospital and subsequently dies, it can be difficult to tie that death back to a specific facility, or to the fact that the individual was even a resident of a facility.

'Death certificates have a field for type of place of death (such as home, inpatient, outpatient/ER, hospice, nursing home, long-term care facility, other). We also capture the name of the facility if the death occurred in a facility.

'The challenge has been identifying long-term-care facility residents who are transferred to, and die in hospitals since the death certificate lists where they actually died.'

It comes amid similar claims in New York where Cuomo faces allegations that the state deliberately under-counted Covid deaths in care homes to hide the scandal.

The state now acknowledges that at least 15,000 long-term care residents died, compared to a figure of 8,700 it had publicized as of late January that didn't include residents who died after being transferred to hospitals.

It comes amid claims that Cuomo tried to deploy Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to silence one of his critics after he spoke to The New York Post about the cover-up.

Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens) told the Post he received a message from one of the Speaker's aide's explaining how he could 'walk back' comments he made in February when the story broke.

Kim had revealed that one of Cuomo's top aides had apologized to Democrats in a conference call which sounded 'like they admitted that they were trying to dodge having any incriminating evidence that might put the administration or the [Health Department] in further trouble with the Department of Justice.'

He revealed that he'd been 'stunned' to receive a text from the Speaker's office which advised him to provide a revised statement to the Post to give 'context' and 'provide more perspective.'

Kim told the paper on Wednesday: 'I came to the conclusion that if I put out this statement, that I would be complicit in the cover-up.'

'Beyond that, the thousands of families I told I would protect — I would have thrown them under the bus,' he added.

Cuomo has come under intense scrutiny after he barred nursing homes from rejecting recovering coronavirus patients being discharged from hospitals in March.

His handling of the nursing home deaths is under a federal probe and is being looked into by the State Assembly.

In August, the DOJ under Donald Trump announced it was requesting information from the Democratic governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan who had 'issued COVID-19 orders that may have resulted in deaths of elderly nursing home residents'.

The New York Times detailed Cuomo's efforts over a period of months to suppress the number of nursing home deaths in New York state.

Some patients who contracted COVID but later died in hospital were not counted in the official death count being released by Cuomo's administration.

The administration refused for months to release more complete data and the true death toll was only released this year after a report by the New York state attorney general found deaths had been under-counted by about half.

Cuomo said in a press conference last month that the Trump administration had used the pandemic against Democratic governors like him for political purposes.

'This was all politics and all a political football that then morphed into an investigation, which made all the lawyers very careful about what the information they put out was,' Cuomo said.

The governor said his administration did not know what numbers to report because different states counted nursing home deaths differently.

'Who do you attribute that death to? Do you attribute it to a nursing home or do you attribute it to a hospital?' he asked.

'How about if you were in a nursing home and got sick and then were sent to a hospital and you died in the hospital? Who do you attribute that death to?'

Cuomo said the decision to bring in the Department of Justice had dramatically raised the stakes, and meant they had to tread carefully as any inaccurate statements could be used later as evidence.

'When you are under investigation by the Department of Justice every piece of paper you submit you'd better be 100% right that is accurate.

'Yes it was political, and yes I think it was despicable and unethical that you use the Department of Justice to make a political investigation.'

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 11:22 AM

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