Link. Coolican writes -
Former state Sen. Scott Jensen, who is the frontrunner to be the Republican nominee for governor, made his first major decision by picking Matt Birk to be his running mate.
Birk is a former professional football player and an outspoken conservative who publicly advocated in 2012 for a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Birk has also been an outspoken skeptic of the severity of COVID-19.
As the Delta variant was ripping through a broad swath of the country in September, he made this astute observation:
“Per the @nytimes today, 0.6 deaths per 100,000 people in the United States of America. OR, 6 people per 1,000,000.”
Either he failed to do the next step in the math problem, or he’s unbelievably callous, because that’s nearly 2,000 people who died from COVID-19 in a single day, likely making it the leading cause of death.
Heart disease, which can refer to different heart conditions, kills about 1,900 per day. Imagine if heart disease were contagious, and then imagine someone saying it isn’t a problem in America.
This was 10 months after Birk announced he would not be getting vaccinated, loudly proclaiming that he knew better than the nation’s leading doctors and scientists.
We are two years into the pandemic, and the toll of death and suffering is staggering, as recently detailed by science journalist Ed Yong.
American life expectancy declined two full years, the greatest decline since the Spanish flu pandemic, largely a function of all the people who died who were younger than 60.
About 1 million more Americans died during the past two years than we would have expected based on mortality rates of the five years previous.
What’s Jensen’s response? Make a full-on COVID denier and anti-vaxxer his running mate.
[...] Thanks to the burgeoning anti-vaccine movement [...] we’ve lagged behind other rich countries in vaccination and boosting rates, and our deaths continue to climb.
Doctors, nurses and other health care workers persevere and grind it out. They say they have never encountered so much death. And, unlike at any time in their professional lives, they often acted as emotional support caregivers because their patients could not have visitors.
Early in the pandemic, Jensen launched a scurrilous smear against these health care colleagues, claiming they were inflating COVID-19 data to get more money from the Medicare program. For that gem, he won a coveted spot in Politifact’s “Lie of the year.”
