Whitmer Gave Us Fake Nursing Home Death Counts

Governor Gretchen Whitmer finally said the quiet part out loud about her deadly and disastrous response to Covid-19.

“Listen,” she said to popular podcast host Caleb Hammer last November when pushed on her pandemic lockdown orders. “None of us wants to go back and relive that. We were doing the best we could with very little or very bad information.”

Very little or very bad information is the least of it. When it came to the admission of infected people into the state’s nursing homes, Whitmer and her health officials were working with no data at all.

They allowed the nursing homes to simply make it up.

According to an initial search of 15,000 pages of unredacted documents obtained by Michigan Enjoyer, Michigan health officials had no grasp of the number of dead within the state's long-term care facilities. And when pushed by the federal government to supply the data by June 2020, the Whitmer administration simply turned to the nursing homes with a wink and a nod.

From March through June—the height of the pandemic—Michigan was among the last states to report nursing home deaths. State health officials had attempted a half-dozen times to tabulate the death count and came up with a half-dozen conflicting numbers.

The feds required a death be counted as a nursing home death regardless of whether it occurred in the facility or at the hospital. But by the end of June 2020, only two-thirds of nursing homes had even reported to state health officials.

According to health department spreadsheets, the total deaths reported by the homes was a mere 255. (As a comparison, New York State reported nearly 7,000 in the same time frame.) Despite the federal guidelines, a team of bean counters in Lansing was removing hospital deaths, anyhow. Their total was just 99 victims.

Caught in a legal and public relations vice, state officials circled back to the nursing homes and asked them to simply self-report a raw number. No name. No age. No data of death. No social security number. It was a simple “take their word for it" arrangement. By mid-June, the Whitmer administration was reporting just 1,947 deaths.

Those original nursing home reports sent by nursing home administrators have since been deleted.

And a year later, Whitmer’s claim that mixing the sick with the healthy in the same building had lead to fewer deaths would be totally debunked.

In August 2020, as the nursing home scandal was enveloping New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, officials in Whitmer’s circle began to panic.

On August 14, a blizzard of emails passed between Whitmer health officials and state epidemiologists asking if an update on the true nursing home death toll had been tabulated.

“This is of great interest to the governor’s office,” a health department official wrote to an epidemiologist. “May I get an ETA of when this (data) could be refined?”

This “refinement” never happened.

Instead, a study was published in September by the Center for Health and Research Transformation, an independent consulting firm attached to the University of Michigan.

Using the state’s flawed and phony data, the CHRT report claimed that Michigan’s nursing home Covid deaths were well below the national average.

CHRT’s findings were taken as gospel among the facile media and the professional fact-checkers.

But documents obtained by Michigan Enjoyer reveal a chummy relationship between the CHRT group and state health officials. A few months before the release of its report, the executive director of CHRT was contacted by a reporter who rightly asked why Michigan was among the last states in the union to publish its nursing home death count.

Before responding to the reporter, the executive director of CHRT emailed two senior HHS officials looking for direction.

“(The reporter) is doing another article on the lack of data in Michigan nursing home cases and deaths from Covid,” wrote Marianne Udow-Phillips. “I’m hoping to better understand the data limitations we’re currently facing and what’s being done to address them. Thanks so much!”

It must be noted that the CHRT’s study was funded by the Michigan Health Endowment, a state-created nonprofit whose nine board governors are appointed by the governor.

What these communications expose is a feedback loop of cognitive dissonance. The media provided questions to the think tank. The think tank, in turn, asked the government to provide it with a response. This was considered independent, scientific confirmation of Whitmer’s devastating strategy.

Udow-Phillips did not respond to request for comment. The phone message at CHRT headquarters, last week, said the office is closed due to the Covid pandemic.

CHRT’s findings were eventually debunked by the Auditor General of Michigan in January 2022. The auditor found the death toll in the first 17 months of the pandemic alone to be 42% higher than Whitmer was reporting to the public.

Whitmer’s health director testified before the House Oversight Committee that its death number was accurate because the Health Department accurately reported what the nursing homes had told them.

Adding to the outrage is a slew of peer-reviewed studies showing that nursing homes that commingled the infected with the healthy across the country had a death rate 72% higher than those that facilities that did not.

“There are some actions that are so foolish and so consequential that they beg for outrage,” wrote Dr. James Goodwin of the University of Texas in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “No individual with the slightest knowledge of nursing homes could have forced nursing home to admit patients with COVID-19. The majority of nursing homes were totally unprepared to quarantine patients with COVID-19.”

So what is the true death count in Michigan’s long-term care facilities? Remember, Michigan continued to commingle the sick and the healthy in the same buildings throughout the pandemic. New York ended the practice after 40 days.

The auditor general counted at least 8,051 dead between March 2020 and July 2021. But Michigan never corrected its total and stopped counting long-term care facility Covid deaths altogether by May 2022.

To this day, the Whitmer administration claims total long-term facility total deaths were just 7,324. The true number of dead in the Great Lakes State may be as high as 14,000. We won’t know without an investigation. But Attorney General Dana Nessel refuses to conduct one.

And Whitmer? She continues to prop the proverbial folder over her face.

“None of us wants to go back and relive that,” she said. “We were doing the best we could with very little or very bad information.”

Many of us do want to go back. We remember every time we pray in memory of your loved ones.

This isn’t over. We have thousands of documents to go.