A much larger fraction of Minnesota’s COVID deaths were nursing home residents than even New York’s. That’s an appalling failure, one that has drawn little media scrutiny. By contrast, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo drew widespread criticism for causing the deaths of thousands of nursing home residents by ordering nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients — a policy also imposed in Minnesota. During the pandemic, thousands of elderly New Yorkers died in nursing homes that Cuomo ordered to accept coronavirus patients. Over 9,000 coronavirus patients were sent into state nursing homes, and over 15,000 long-term care residents died, with Cuomo attempting to conceal the cause of many of their deaths.
Even as infectious COVID patients were being sent into nursing homes, some residents were deprived of all human contact with their loved ones by state COVID regulations, in order to promote “social distancing.” That isolation of the elderly caused some of them to die from despair and loneliness.
At Healthy Skeptic, Kevin Roche catalogs the deadly failures of Minnesota state government, in a message directed to Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) Commissioner Jan Malcolm. She is the appointee of Democratic Governor Tim Walz, who was most responsible to causing the deaths of so many elderly people. Rather than taking responsibility for her actions, Malcolm is full of “self-pity“. Roche points out to Malcolm that
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• You supported lockdowns which disrupted all Minnesotans lives, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the closure of thousands of businesses, resulting in financial and mental health distress.
• You constantly provided misleading and incomplete information to the public and continue to do so to this day. You have been more interested in releasing data that support 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 Covid were not primarily for treatment of that condition. You supported crazy approaches to attributing deaths to Covid. 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.
• You lied about vaccine effectiveness and supported vaccine mandates which worsened health care staffing problems and led to worse health care.
Roche declares: “In short, you are guilty of ignoring the overall public health and spreading coronamonomania. Far from improving outcomes in Minnesota, whether from Covid-or other diseases, you worsened them. So spare us your self-pity, Commissioner Malcolm, and think about how you might atone for all the harm you have done to Minnesotans.” Governor Walz should fire Commissioner Malcolm, and take responsibility for the disaster that occurred on his watch.
