The MLG COVID response “defense” that isn’t

At the Rio Grande Foundation we LOVE it when we appear in media outlets thanks to writings of others. It means that we’ve hit a nerve and that people are paying attention. Unfortunately, papers don’t always give us an opportunity to respond, so we respond HERE.

The latest is a piece by “democracy activist” John House and it is in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The author calls it “A defense of the Gov’s pandemic actions,” but it really is no such thing. The author mostly wishes to discount the content of a deposition by Health Secretary Tracie Collins that we published online, but he doesn’t actually make any salient points. Instead he makes the red-herring argument that Sen. Cliff Pirtle and RGF believe that absent the Gov.’s lockdown policies, the economy would be “just fine.”

In reality, there would have been impacts from the Virus alone, but with locked-down New Mexico and other “blue” states having the highest unemployment rates and more open “red” states having the lowest, he clearly glosses over the impact of the Gov.’s policies. Just to be clear, New Mexico now has the 13th-highest death rate from COVID, so MLG’s lockdown policies haven’t exactly succeeded.

Way back in April of 2020, the Rio Grande Foundation outlined an alternative approach to fighting COVID 19 in New Mexico. We called it “Fairly Open.” It involved being fair with businesses and allowing them to innovate. It meant being open and transparent about the data being used and working to explain her decisions to the people of New Mexico. If House REALLY believes MLG did a good job on COVID he didn’t do a very good job of defending her.