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Michigan Gov. Whitmer faces backlash for visiting elderly father in Florida during pandemic

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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, (D-Michigan), visited Florida more than a month ago despite blaming travelers for the new COVID variants in Michigan.

https://twitter.com/MIGOP/status/1384283885589078018

Whitmer’s trip came weeks after she warned the public against spring break trips, specifically to Florida.

Tiffany Brown, a spokesperson for Whitmer, said the Michigan governor traveled to Florida to visit her father who is fighting a chronic illness.

“The governor did not go on spring break, and she has not left the state in over a month,” Brown said in a statement. “In the past six months she has left the state three times, once for the inauguration, once to assist her elderly father who is battling chronic illness, and once to visit Michigan’s National Guard troops.”

Whitmer’s father “was fully vaccinated and the governor,” who was not vaccinated at the time, “is tested regularly and has never tested positive for COVID,” Brown said. “The trip was not paid for at taxpayers’ expense.”

Ted Goodman, the communications director of the state’s Republican Party, said Whitmer’s “blatant display of hypocrisy is an insult to every single Michigander impacted by her lockdown orders and travel warnings.”

“Not only did Whitmer and her top staffers vacation to Florida, but they tried to keep it secret because for Whitmer, it’s—rules for thee, but not for me.”

Chris Gustafson, a spokesman for the Republican Governors Association, said: “Whitmer’s rampant hypocrisy continues to insult hard-working Michiganders who struggle to get past her disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Two of Whitmer’s top staffers, including Michigan’s health director, vacationed in southern states despite Whitmer’s recommendation to avoid travel.

Despite Michigan’s strict coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions, Michigan has reported the second-highest number of cases of a more contagious variant that was first identified in the U.K. Michigan also had the country’s worst infection rate earlier this month, the Associated Press reported.

Follow Annaliese Levy on Twitter @AnnalieseLevy

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Former Harvard medical professor says he was fired for opposing Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates

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Covid

“My hope is that someday, Harvard will find its way back to academic freedom and independence.” That is the heartfelt message from Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard University professor of medicine since 2003, who recently announced publicly he was fired for “clinging to the truth” in his opposition to Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

Kulldorff posted the news on social media alongside an essay published in the City Journal last week. The epidemiologist and biostatistician also spoke with National Review about the incident. Kulldorff says he was fired by the Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham hospital system and put on a leave of absence by Harvard Medical School in November 2021 over his stance on Covid.

Nearly two years later, in October 2023, his leave of absence was terminated as a matter of policy, marking the end of his time at the university. Harvard severed ties with Kulldorff “all on their initiative,” he said.

The history of the medical professional’s public stance on Covid-19 vaccines and mandates is detailed by National Review:

Censorship and rejection led Kulldorff to co-author the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020 alongside Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University. Together, the three public-health scientists argued for limited and targeted Covid-19 restrictions that “protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives,” as Kulldorff put it in his essay.

“The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous,” he wrote, naming former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins as the one who ordered a “devastating published takedown” of the declaration.

Testifying before Congress in January, Collins reaffirmed his previous statements attacking the Great Barrington Declaration.

Despite the coordinated effort against it, the document has over 939,000 signatures in favor of age-based focused protection.

The Great Barrington Declaration’s authors, who advocated the quick reopening of schools, have been vindicated by recent studies that confirm pandemic-era school closures were, in fact, detrimental to student learning. The data show that students from third through eighth grade who spent most of the 2020–21 school year in remote learning fell more than half a grade behind in math scores on average, while those who attended school in person dropped a little over a third of a grade, according to a New York Times review of existing studies. In addition to learning losses, school closures did very little to stop the spread of Covid, studies show.

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