Weaponizing the virus

The Wuhan virus, a/k/a COVID-19, has been weaponized by the Progressive left. More masks, more lockdowns – all driven by politics.  And telling the truth can be hazardous to your health.  Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media reports: 

Minnesota State Sen. Scott Jensen (R-Carver County), a doctor who was named the Family Physician of the Year in 2016, now faces an investigation for alleged “misinformation” and “recklessness” in his public statements about the coronavirus pandemic. The Minnesota Board of Medical Practice is investigating him for warning that coronavirus deaths may be inflated due to financial incentives to put “COVID-19” on death certificates and for comparing COVID-19 to the common flu.

“Less than a week ago, I was notified by the Board of Medical Practice in Minnesota that I was being investigated because of public statements I’ve made,” Jensen announced in a video posted Sunday. He said the complaints were anonymous, so he will not be able to face his accusers.

. . .

. . . “Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate. Why? Because if it’s a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for – if they’re Medicare – typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000,” Jensen wrote on Facebook. “But if it’s COVID-19 pneumonia, then it’s $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000.”

On April 21, FactCheck.org concluded, “The figures cited by Jensen generally square with estimated Medicare payments for COVID-19 hospitalizations, based on average Medicare payments for patients with similar diagnoses.”

Later that month, New York funeral directors told Project Veritas that they had seen “COVID-19” marked as a cause of death on death certificates even when the patient had not tested positive for coronavirus. The funeral directors said there was a financial incentive to twist the facts. When The New York Times named 1,000 coronavirus victims on its front page in May, it included a man whose death police are investigating as a homicide.

. . .

In his video, Dr. Jensen claims, “I’ve got the Department of Health in Illinois where one of the directors says, ‘Just because we put COVID-19 on the death certificate as the cause of death, that doesn’t mean the patient died of COVID-19.'”

As for the claim that Jensen engaged in “recklessness” by comparing COVID-19 to the common flu, the doctor and state senator quoted Dr. Anthony Fauci in an editorial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases [for COVID-19] is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%),” Fauci wrote.

The rest of the report is here.  And I do not trust Gov. DeWine's "orders."

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