Muffy Tingstud

“I am not challenging the mandate because I support it. If it is my job to ensure the health, safety and welfare of the residents of this state, then I think everyone ought to get vaccinated unless they have a medical reason that prevents them from doing so.” Dana Michelle Nessel holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan (1990) and a J.D. from Wayne State University Law School (1994). She is a former assistant prosecutor in Wayne County for eleven years, private civil-rights and criminal-defense attorney, and Attorney General of Michigan since January 2019. No M.D., no epidemiology, no immunology, no public-health degree, no clinic. The credential for declaring that everyone medically eligible ought to get the shot, and for offering herself as a dunk-tank prize for those who do, is a law degree and the attorney general’s office. In June 2021 she sat in a dunk tank at a Genesee County expungement fair in Flint. Vaccines were available on site; she tweeted that getting vaccinated earned the right to dunk the AG. In December 2021 she said she would support President Biden’s OSHA vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers before the Supreme Court, that she was not challenging it because she supported it, and that if her job was to ensure the health, safety, and welfare of the state then everyone ought to get vaccinated unless a medical reason prevented them. She said she did not think the United States would have had Delta or Omicron if more people had gotten vaccinated when the shots were available. She called the attorneys general who were challenging the mandate “irresponsible and reckless.” The platform was the attorney general’s office and a county fair. She offered a carnival dunk as the incentive, then told the state that the fastest track to normalcy was immediate vaccination for everyone medically eligible, and that the variants themselves were the result of too few people taking the shot. The product did not stop infection or transmission. She is still Attorney General. The workers who faced the large-employer rule she said she would defend in court, and the residents who dunked her after rolling up a sleeve, did not get a correction when the welfare she assigned to the needle failed the one job she assigned it. She said her job was to ensure the welfare. Then the welfare kept getting infected, and the support for mandates crippled public trust.