Covid-19 may have arrived in Michigan two weeks before Gov. Gretchen Whitmer admitted it.
A governor who claimed to be listening to the experts throughout the pandemic ignored Michigan’s chief medical officer in the early handling of the virus.
Dr. Joneigh Khaldun said that nursing homes should be closed off to anyone but residents and staff who pass a Covid test. Two months later, Whitmer ordered Covid-sick people into nursing homes, the exact opposite of expert advice. Thousands of old people died alone as a result.
Whitmer also ignored Khaldun’s warning that Covid had already arrived in Michigan in late February. It was not until March 10 that Whitmer would declare a state of emergency, based on two presumptive positive cases.
As the New York Times Magazine reported in a June 2020 profile of Whitmer, emphasis added:
“As the governor began moving ahead with her agenda, though, the state’s chief medical executive, Dr. Joneigh S. Khaldun, was watching the gathering storm with growing concern,” the publication reported. “Potentially infected travelers were arriving daily in Michigan, but the Centers for Disease Control was not providing her with the support she needed to adequately detect and contain the virus.
“On Feb. 27, Khaldun briefed the governor and her staff on the epidemic in a conference room adjacent to her office. She said that she was convinced the coronavirus had already come to Michigan; she just couldn’t prove it,” NYT Magazine said. “Khaldun reminded Whitmer and her staff that there was no vaccine for this virus, that it was highly contagious and that it was much more deadly than the flu.
“In order to prevent a widespread outbreak, she said, it would almost certainly be necessary to take some pretty extreme measures, like banning large group gatherings and maybe even ordering certain businesses to close temporarily,” according to the profile.
What happened in the 13 days between when Khaldun briefed the governor and Whitmer declared the emergency?
The 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary.
Whitmer spent the weekend ahead of the March 10 primary pushing Biden in Detroit.
“This is an important couple of days,” Whitmer said at a church on Detroit’s west side. “The whole world is focusing on Michigan right now and with good reason.”
Biden had just won the South Carolina primary and needed momentum from Michigan. That fact was not lost on his campaign co-chair, Whitmer.
“When our back was against the wall and the auto industry was struggling, it was Barack Obama and Joe Biden who had Michigan’s back,” Whitmer told the Detroit church. “And so right now, in this moment, it’s important that we have his back too.”
Michigan had Biden’s back indeed. He won Michigan, and Whitmer celebrated on stage with him. She would later call the event a “superspreader.”
That night, when Whitmer held a press conference declaring a state of emergency, Khaldun said the cases were known “a couple of hours ago.”
“We opened up this state emergency operations center a few weeks ago, in an abundance of caution,” Whitmer added, later in the eight-minute press conference.
How did the state learn of the cases? According to Khaldun, people had to drive to Lansing to be tested.
“These tests were performed at our state laboratory here in Lansing,” Khaldun said, adding they had yet to be confirmed by the CDC.
Which is to say, had the then-hospitalized patients not driven to Lansing to be tested, there would be no positive tests on the books.
It’s easy to avoid declaring the presence of a global virus if nobody knows they need to go to Lansing to get tested, or that this is a service offered.
Khaldun left the state under a non-disclosure agreement, an unusual arrangement in Michigan government. So we can’t know her side of the story.
But reading between the lines, we have a doctor who believed the virus had hit Michigan on Feb. 27, but “just couldn’t prove it,” and a governor who needed her candidate—Joe Biden, the man who might choose her as his running mate—to win on March 10.
If Khaldun was denied permission to “prove it” until March 10, until the election was over, would her departure be handled any differently?
If people had to come to Lansing to be tested for Covid, but the state had not announced this, where did the two positive tests come from?
Khaldun said the two people who tested positive were “hospitalized” by the time of the press conference. This suggests an odd timeline: They drove to Lansing, got tested, and only then went to the hospital?
The same week Whitmer was closing schools over 12 cases, Ohio estimated there were 100,000 cases. Given that the states border each other, and the global nature of the virus, would not the Ohio number be closer to truth?
In the early days of the pandemic, Whitmer did not act “in an abundance of caution,” or act on expert advice.
There was a presidential primary to win.
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.
