Two Minnesota lawmakers are calling for a national audit of the country’s coronavirus death total, arguing that COVID-19 deaths in their own state have been wildly inflated.
State Reps. Mary Franson and Scott Jensen said they “enlisted” experts to go through Minnesota’s numbers, and what they found was that the state had mischaracterized hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of deaths as COVID-19-related.
“We should not have people dying in motor vehicle collisions, suicides, drownings, et cetera and being classified as a COVID death,” Franson told Fox News on Thursday, noting that the presumed death toll is one of the primary reasons Minnesota remains locked down.
Jensen alleged that the states, encouraged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are intentionally inflating COVID-19 deaths to drag out the lockdown as long as they possibly can.
“When the Department of Health and the CDC decided to change the rules that had been in place for 17 years by encouraging the diagnosis of COVID-19 in situations that we never would have otherwise, they were abandoning their long-held commitment to precisely identifying the inciting or the initiating event that would lead to a sequence of events that would lead to a person’s demise,” he explained.
“What we saw subsequently was enhanced payments to hospitals for Medicare patients and then we saw the old adage — follow the money — and we saw if hospitals could somehow hit 161 admissions with COVID-19, then they would be eligible for a $77,000 per admission payment through the CARES Act,” Jensen continued.
“I don’t think there’s any questions that reverse incentives have been created.”
A number of stories have emerged over the past few months confirming Franson and Jensen’s concerns. In Colorado, for example, the state’s Department of Health placed two gunshot victims who died from their injuries in the states coronavirus death tolls, even though they did not die from COVID-19.
And late last year, research indicated that Washington state’s coronavirus death tolls are riddled with cases — as much as 13% of the total — in which the death certificate made no reference to COVID-19 as a cause of death.
