Republican Tudor Dixon Hammers Gretchen Whitmer on Nursing Homes, Coronavirus Policies at Debate

Republican Tudor Dixon hammered Democrat Gretchen Whitmer for her nursing home policy and overall coronavirus response during the Michigan governor’s debate on Thursday night.

When asked by the debate moderators if she would have made any different decisions based on the knowledge she has now that the pandemic has waned, Whitmer essentially gave the “hindsight is 20/20” defense:

We know that this was a brand new virus that we didn’t know a lot about. We knew that our hospitals were filling up and that people were dying. We were in a desperate search for masks and ventilators. There were refrigerated trucks outside of some of our hospitals to store people’s bodies who didn’t survive.

It was a desperate time. Lives were on the line. Studies have shown that our actions saved thousands of lives. Now 35,000 people in our state have died from Covid. They may not matter to some, but they matter to me. Every single one of them. If I could go back in time with the knowledge we have now, sure, I would’ve made some different decisions, but we were working in the middle of a crisis and lives were on the line.

Dixon gutted Whitmer for all of her policies, from her sending virus-positive patients into nursing homes to her excessive shutdowns of schools to her attempts to downplay overall nursing home deaths.

“We have the letter from the nursing home association that said, whatever you do, don’t send Covid patients into nursing homes, and yet, the governor did,” said Dixon. “When Andrew Cuomo even backed off of this, Gov. Whitmer doubled down.” She continued:

She even tried to hide the final report of the numbers of how many deaths we had. In fact, she has tried to hide a lot from this pandemic. She tried to hide or she did hide effectively, why her department of Health and Human Services Director left. In fact, she even paid him off with a secrecy agreement.

As Center Square reported, a recent audit found that Whitmer undercounted nursing home deaths by a whopping 42 percent:

A new audit found Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration undercounted COVID-19 nursing home deaths by 42%, or 2,386.

At issue is how many nursing deaths occurred in Michigan and whether Whitmer’s COVID-19 policies exacerbated nursing home deaths by housing infected patients with those most vulnerable to die from COVID-19. COVID-19 disproportionately kills the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions. In Michigan, 84% of the state’s total COVID-19 victims were people aged 60 and older.

The Auditor General’s report found the total number of COVID-19 deaths at long-term care facilities at 8,061, compared to the state’s previous self-reported tally of 5,675.

In her rebuttal, Whitmer accused Dixon of essentially peddling conspiracy theories about masks and vaccines, only to be hammered again for her excessive lockdown policies that crippled Michigan’s economy.

“She can’t be honest because she knows that her response was so completely horrendous,” said Dixon. “In fact, she closed the restaurants down longer than any other state, and we lost 3,000 restaurants, but we just got a report today: Michigan is having a slower comeback than any of our surrounding states. So not only did she make bad choices when she closed us down and refused to open our schools, but she hasn’t figured out how to recover.”