Tim Walz's COVID policy as Minnesota Governor

Snitch lines, prolonged school closure, and the desire to censor 'misinformation'

Tim Walz is the Democratic vice presidential candidate and governor of Minnesota. I admit that I didn’t follow Minnesota closely during the COVID19 pandemic, but over the last few days, I have seen many discuss his handling of COVID.

COVID is over though. It is just a common cold, and nearly no Americans care about it anymore. Why should we care? The answer is the pandemic policy response reflects what politicians do when they face new challenges. They can’t rely on their party platform or talking points, but their intuition and intelligence. Here is what Tim Walz did.

He created a hotline so that you could complain about a neighbor that violated the stay at home order. You can listen to audio here.

He kept schools closed longer than even other Democratic governors like Gina Raimondo (Rhode Island). He did so likely because he is pro-teachers union.

When confronted with the fact that prolonged school closure was harmful he has repeatedly denied that.

Here he claims it taught kids resilience

In this video, he deflects the school closure question by asking if anyone considered the many who died of COVID19. The error of his reasoning here is that this implies that closure reduced the number of people who died. There is no evidence that it did so. In fact, the best studies at the time showed school closure harmed children without benefit to third parties. I discussed this repeatedly in 2020 on my show Plenary Session.

Finally, in this video clip, Tim Walz states that free speech does not apply to misinformation. Notably, during the pandemic the idea that lab leak was a possible viral origin source was deemed misinformation and censored by facebook. Many social media platforms restricted the ability to discuss vaccine side effects freely, claiming (wrongly) that myocarditis was misinformation.

In contrast with even other Republican governors like Ron DeSantis, and Democratic governors like Gina Raimondo, Tim Walz appears to have a very poor COVID19 policy track record characterized by blindly cheerleading for positions taken by the progressive left— even when those positions directly and maximally hurt poor minority children— the very kids progressives claim to care about.

In one interview the governor proudly touts his death rate per capita as evidence he did a good job. It would be foolish to compare this statistic unless it is adjusted for age, BMI, socioeconomics, population density and more. It is not a measure of good policy, and it is unscientific to use it as such.

My rating of Minnesota’s COVID19 policy: D+