Two Minnesota lawmakers, Rep. Mary Franson and Sen. Scott Jensen, are causing waves after making a bombshell claim that COVID deaths are being heavily inflated. This happened last week after a review of thousands of death certificates.

This per the Washington Examiner.

State Rep. Mary Franson and state Sen. Scott Jensen released a video last week revealing that after reviewing thousands of death certificates in the state, 40% did not have COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death.

“I have other examples where COVID isn’t the underlying cause of death, where we have a fall. Another example is we have a freshwater drowning. We have dementia. We have a stroke and multiorgan failure,” Franson said in the video.

She added that in one case, a person who was ejected from a car was “counted as a COVID death” because the virus was in his system.

Franson said she and a team reviewed 2,800 “death certificate data points” and found that about 800 of them did not have the virus as the underlying cause of death.

This is not just quibbling about whether the virus was the primary cause death. Obviously, you can have cases where the virus was not the cause of death, yet was the catalyst that pushed other co-morbidities into fatal territory. But what Franson and Jensen are talking about is death certificates claiming a COVID death where their obviously wasn’t one. Someone who drowned did not die of COVID just because they had the virus. Someone falling should not be classified as a coronavirus death either.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this. There have been other isolated reviews which have shown issues with deaths being attributed to the virus when the virus clearly wasn’t the cause. There was a case in another state where someone who died in a motorcycle accident was determined to have died of coronavirus simply because it was in his system. We’ve even seen people who have tested negative prior to death still be written up as having died of the virus.

Whenever any of this is brought up, it’s quickly brushed away as a random, isolated mistake, yet the more these things are scrutinized, the more mistakes are found. That’s not to say the virus isn’t highly deadly. It is, especially for certain at risk segments of the population. That doesn’t mean we should be keeping inaccurate records, though.

Franson and Jensen want an audit to get to the bottom of this.

Because the narrative is already so set in stone and because those opposed will decry it as insensitive, I doubt this goes anywhere. Fear sells better than facts, and that’s never been more true than with this pandemic. You can expect all inaccuracies to be swept under the rug, even if they could give us a clearer picture of just who is the most vulnerable to the virus.

(Please follow me on Twitter! @bonchieredstate)