Inside the Think Tank That Whitewashed Whitmer's Nursing Home Deaths
CHRT, whose office was still closed for Covid when we visited, helped coordinate the glowing PR campaign
Ann Arbor — The Whitmer administration hired an “outside, independent non-profit” to conduct a nursing home response study back in 2020.
That “independent” analysis ultimately claimed that Whitmer’s strategy of placing Covid-infected people inside nursing homes was a great success.
The study was released to the Michigan media who took it as gospel, and the swirling questions about what was really happening behind closed doors came to an abrupt end.
Now, Michigan Enjoyer has unearthed 50,000 pages of internal health department documents that throw the validity and independence of that study into question.
We called the nonprofit’s office a dozen times. The recorded message was the same: “You have reached CHRT — the Center for Health and Research Transformation. Our office hours are Monday through Friday 8:30 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Friday. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, our office space is not open to visitors.”
What in the world? Apparently, no one had informed the so-called experts that Biden had officially ended the pandemic three years ago.
We left messages. None were returned. So we drove out to Ann Arbor to their office space. Damn their Covid restrictions.
A security guard escorted us up to their second-floor suite and key-swiped us in. The place brought to mind an empty appliance box. The lights were on, but there were no people. There were eight cubicles with computer monitors but no computers. No photographs. No stacks of paperwork. Just dust and a moldering coffee pot.
The security guard was discombobulated. “I’m just confused,” she said.
“Me, too.” I said.
Whitmer was facing tremendous pressure over her nursing home policy in the summer of 2020. She and her health experts had co-opted the practice of commingling the sick and healthy from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
But Cuomo had abandoned the practice 40 days into the pandemic under withering criticism from family members of people who had died in nursing homes.
Whitmer, inexplicably, continued with the practice. And with the criticism mounting, she needed to show it worked. So her Health Department hired the Center for Health & Research Transformation through another nonprofit whose board of directors is controlled by Whitmer.
CHRT was then headed by Marianne Udow-Phillips, a former Blue Cross Blue Shield executive and former director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services under Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
The documents show that Udow-Phillips, a supposedly independent outsider, was actually an insider who was actively communicating with health officials while conducting the study.
And they were planning a public relations push before the report was finalized.
“We had a productive call with Marianne this afternoon,” a bureaucrat wrote to then Director of the Department of Human Services Robert Gordon. “They plan to issue a press release in conjunction with the report and we discussed the idea of doing a virtual press briefing together.”
“Yes they are putting a chart into their report that is very powerful and we should widely disseminate,” Gordon wrote back. “From my perspective, the main points are: CHRT evidence shows the core of our policy, hubs, was reasonable and effective.”
The problem with all of this is that Michigan health officials knew the death data in the federally funded nursing homes was comically flawed. Yet the nonprofit took that data at face value, anyhow.
A few months before the release of the nursing home report, the director of CHRT emailed HHS officials looking for direction about what to feed the media.
“(A reporter) is doing another article on the lack of data in Michigan nursing home cases and deaths from Covid,” wrote Udow-Phillips. “I’m hoping to better understand the data limitations were currently facing and what’s being done to address them. Thanks so much!”
In the end, Michigan’s final nursing home death count is at least 25% lower than the final tallies of both the Auditor General of Michigan and the federal government.
Udow-Phillips, who also worked as an intermediary between the Health Department and the Michigan press corps, declined an interview.
Gordon, who left the Michigan health department in January 2021 with a $155,506.05 severance package and a non-disclosure agreement with Gov. Whitmer, went on to serve as a Biden Asst. Secretary of Health and Human Resources.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Gordon is now the vice president of a nonprofit think tank leading efforts to modernize state-level administration systems.
Efforts to contact him proved fruitless. His nonprofit has no centralized office and no publicly listed phone number.
