A top aide to Michigan‘s Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was caught taking a spring-break vacation to Florida just days after Whitmer warned residents not to travel due to the state’s uptick in coronavirus cases.
NEW: Gov. Whitmer’s top aide Tricia Foster defies governor’s travel warnings, travels to Florida for spring break vacation
Screenshots of Foster’s FB page obtained by @BreitbartNews ? pic.twitter.com/Iw4sLuR1bh
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 10, 2021
Tricia Foster, Whitmer’s chief operating officer, posted photos on Facebook of her family vacationing in Siesta Key, according to Breitbart.
Whitmer’s office did not deny that Foster violated her boss’s travel restrictions by traveling to Florida, but dismissed reports about her vacation as a “partisan attack from a garbage white nationalist website.”
“Trish Foster is fully recovered from COVID and fully vaccinated,” Whitmer press secretary Bobby Leddy said.
When asked whether Foster’s daughters and their friends were fully vaccinated as well, Leddy said, “I don’t have anything additional to have.”
Foster took the photos down after they were discovered, according to the Detroit Free Press.
In them, she, her daughters and their friends were seen maskless and not practicing social distancing.
Such actions are generally accepted in the Sunshine State, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has kept outbreak levels substantially lower than most of his Democrat counterparts. Florida’s mortality rate of about 0.16% is equivalent to that of a seasonal flu.
In Michigan, however—where Whitmer led the country in lockdown severity before finally loosening restrictions while —the outbreak has spiked again, leading the Biden administration’s new head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to urge another shutdown.
In a press conference this week, Whitmer urged Michiganders to continue wearing masks, practicing social distancing, and staying home as much as possible.
“Policy change alone won’t change the tide,” Whitmer said on Friday. “We need everyone to step up and to take personal responsibility here.”
Just a few days before Foster posted about her Florida vacation, her boss, Whitmer, warned Michiganders not to travel—especially not to Florida.
“Students and families traveling across Michigan, to other states or out of the country risk being exposed to and carrying COVID-19 with them,” Whitmer’s office said in a press release. “This, in turn, could fuel outbreaks within their households and the communities where they live or visit.”
