Minnesota State Senator and medical doctor Scott Jensen questioned the accuracy of Governor Tim Walz’s COVID-19 predictions during an interview with KX4, Tuesday.
Jensen says that that the state has not been forthcoming with the methods it’s used to model the spread of coronavirus. These models have been used to justify sweeping shutdowns of public life. Jensen also says that doctors are being encouraged to list COVID-19 on death certificates, even when such a diagnosis has not been proven.
“Have you yet seen the information that’s going into these U of M models that the governor is using?” interviewer Chris Berg asked Jensen.
“No we have not. We have asked for those and we were told by the Governor’s office that we would receive the data… we’re hoping to see what the assumptions are and what the data is, but at this point in time we have not,” he said. Since this interview took place, Jensen has not given any public indication that he has received the data.
“When we start talking about the data that goes into the modeling we have to ask ourselves a question: ‘are we being forthright, are we sharing with the public?’… we want to know what’s going into your modeling,” the senator said.
“I think that people are starting to say ‘hold it now, we need to have a deeper understanding of this and we’re not getting it,'” he added.
Jensen also suggested that the state may have a vested interest in keeping the details of its predictive modeling under wraps. “Fear is a great way to control people,” he observed. “Sometimes we’re so darn interested in jazzing up the fear factor that people’s’ ability to think for themselves is paralyzed.”
He then told KX4 viewers how he “received an email last week from the department of health coaching me on how to fill out death certificates.” The senator said the state sent him a document that seemed to suggest that COVID-19 should be listed as a cause of death even in cases where no conclusive test was performed
RELATED: State Senator: Minnesota Department Of Health Artificially Inflating COVID-19 Death Count
Senator Jensen is not the only public figure to raise concern about mis-labeled deaths falsely inflating the COVID-19 body count.
Fox New’s Tucker Carlson noted during his show, Tuesday, that as the coronavirus death toll rises, that of conventional pneumonia has fallen. This may indicate that deaths resulting from pneumonia are being mislabeled as resulting from COVID-19.
Skepticism about the state’s statistical techniques has lead some prominent Minnesota Republicans to question Walz’s sweeping order to close the state’s economy. State Senators Paul Gazelka, Jerry Relph well as Jason Lewis and others have all publicly asked the Walz administration to consider allowing some small business to reopen.
“We have to ask ourselves what businesses are safe, and what businesses are unsafe… We should be looking at it from the standpoint of who should be closed, not who should be open,” Relph said in a video he posted to Facebook.
He then continued, noting the differences between a landscaping business with a small crew and a bar or restaurant. According to his logic, it makes sense to allow the landscapers to re-open while keeping the bars closed.
Kyle Hooten
Kyle Hooten is Managing Editor of Alpha News. His coverage of Minneapolis has been featured on television shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight and in print media outlets like the Wall Street Journal.
