First thing Monday morning, Freedom Foundation Labor Policy Director Max Nelsen made public the results of an investigation he’d been conducting into the methods used by the Washington State Department Health to tabulate how many of the state’s residents had been killed by the COVID-19 virus.
Turns out that, as was reported in Colorado just a few days earlier, the policy here was to pad the numbers by adding in victims who had been diagnosed with the virus but died of something else — including, as we later found out, gunshot wounds.
A few hours after the report was released, reporters at Jay Inslee’s regular Monday morning COVID update ambushed the governor with Max’s findings. Rather than admit the exaggerations and promise to fix the problem, Inslee began by saying he knew nothing of the report, then mischaracterizing what its contents, and finally labeling it “conspiracy claims from the planet Pluto.”
That night, Nelsen appeared on Fox News with Laura Ingraham, who showed video of the governor’s slanderous abdication of responsibility.
The punch line to the story: By Thursday morning, there could no longer be any denying the truth of Nelsen’s numbers, which were taken straight from the Department of Health’s own website. Consequently, Inslee did the only thing he could — he threw DOH under the bus and sent a wonk out to a hastily arranged videoconference to admit the Freedom Foundation was right all the time.
No word yet on when we can expect Inslee’s apology.
Watch Nelsen’s interview with Laura Ingraham here.
