Michigan journalist claims Whitmer admin's nursing home death count could be '100% higher' than reported

close

Video

Charlie LeDuff claims Michigan nursing home COVID death counts are 'B.S.'

Journalist sounds off on reported documents purporting to show underreporting of statistics.

A Michigan journalist claimed on Wednesday that a 2020 "pilot program study" reveals the COVID-related nursing home death counts in the Great Lakes State could be double what Governor Gretchen Whitmer's administration has reported.

Charlie LeDuff joined "Tucker Carlson Tonight" to voice his concerns after the documents he studied purportedly showed just under half of the 6,945 deaths classified as "vital records reviews" could be traced back to nursing home addresses. Direct nursing home reportings, he said, were done on an "honor system."

LeDuff said that while New York has grouped deaths of people in nursing homes versus hospital deaths, "Michigan doesn't know."

"They found of all the rest of them that 50% were nursing home residents. You know what they did? They stopped looking," he said of the pilot study.

"Just like the story about [The State Department stopping former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's probe of the] Wuhan lab. They didn't want to know the answer. I asked them, why did you stop? [They said] It was too time-consuming."

LeDuff then produced an example Michigan death certificate for an 86-year-old military veteran named Clarence, whom the reporter said the state of Michigan "threw around like a laundry bag."

Video

"He died in Detroit receiving hospital. The health department said it was too time-consuming where he lived," he remarked, going on to point to a line on the death certificate with Clarence's home address. LeDuff claiming that a brief internet search identified the address as a nursing home.

"This is B.S.," he said, adding that to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, it was apparently too "time-consuming" to reverse-lookup home addresses but not too time-consuming to micromanage the lives of Michiganders down to prohibitions on purchasing paint at hardware stores and citing people for kayaking.

"The federal government sent the state of Michigan $500 million to the health department for the COVID response. You could not hire people to Google addresses?" he asked.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Michigan is not the only state under fire for its handling of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes.

During her confirmation hearing to become President Biden's undersecretary of health, recently departed Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine was grilled by lawmakers on Harrisburg press coverage of the similar crisis in nursing homes under her watch.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is also under fire for his administration's handling of COVID in nursing homes, including allegations death counts were underreported as LeDuff claims they were in Michigan.