Trust the Science, or lose your job
Kelly Morrison Cheered the Lockdown. Minnesotans Are Still Paying For It.
On March 25, 2020, when Governor Walz signed the order shutting Minnesota down, Kelly Morrison didn’t hesitate. She put out a statement praising it, saying she was “grateful to Governor Walz for his steadfast leadership” and that his order would “help save lives.” As a physician, she told Minnesotans this was simply “the right thing” and that we needed to trust the plan.
I remember that spring differently.
I was running At Home Fitness MN, building a business from the ground up, the same way I’ve built everything else in my life. My model was in-home personal training, so when the state shut every gym in Minnesota down, we should have been the option left standing. Instead, Tim Walz made it clear that Minnesotans weren’t supposed to have anyone in their homes, period. My clients got scared. Not scared of the virus necessarily, scared of getting reported, or getting in trouble, for having a trainer show up at their own front door. I watched a business built specifically to work around a shutdown get strangled anyway, by fear the state itself created. Meanwhile, liquor stores never closed for a single day. Nobody in St. Paul explained how a bottle of vodka was more “essential” than a personal trainer, or why a substance that suppresses the immune system got a pass while gyms, and my clients’ own front doors, didn’t.
Kids couldn’t have birthday parties. I know because I ran a car club, Sota Cars, and when the state shut down every place a kid could celebrate, families started messaging us asking if we’d drive by their houses instead. So we did — car shows and rallies across the Twin Cities, Corvettes and Lamborghinis rolling down neighborhood streets because it was the only birthday some of these kids were going to get. That’s what Minnesota families were reduced to. Not because the virus demanded it, but because career politicians like Kelly Morrison told us it did, and dared anyone to question it.
Morrison leaned hard on her medical degree during all of this. She’s an OB-GYN — not an epidemiologist, not an infectious disease specialist — but she used the letters after her name to tell Minnesotans to fall in line and mask up, no debate allowed. When you look back now, the guidance she was so confident about changed constantly, our kids fell behind in school, and small businesses across this state, including mine, never fully recovered. “Trust the science” turned into “trust me,” and Minnesotans who asked reasonable questions got treated like the problem.
I made my own choice through all of this: I haven’t taken a COVID vaccine, and I’m not going to. That was, and still is, my decision to make about my own body — not the government’s, and not my doctor-turned-politician state representative’s.
Fast forward to April 12, 2022. While plenty of Minnesotans were still dealing with the fallout of the shutdown, Morrison posted on Facebook celebrating her second COVID booster, telling people to check the CDC’s guidelines and thanking her pharmacist, hashtag #GetBoosted. Two years earlier we were told masks and distancing would stop the spread. Then we were told the vaccine would stop the spread. Then we were told you needed a booster. Then another one. People lost their jobs over refusing to comply with mandates built on promises that kept changing every few months. Minnesotans who asked why the goalposts kept moving got told to trust the science. Kelly Morrison was one of the loudest voices telling us to fall in line.
We now know, straight from Dr. Fauci’s own mouth, what “trust the science” was really worth. In July 2026, under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than one hundred times rather than answer basic questions about the pandemic response he oversaw. The man Kelly Morrison and politicians like her told us to trust without question wouldn’t even answer questions about it under oath. That’s not science. That’s an admission that something wasn’t on the level.
And it wasn’t just adults who paid the price. Minneapolis Public Schools required unvaccinated high school athletes to submit to weekly COVID testing just to stay on their teams, singling out kids and families who made a different medical choice. Meanwhile, real safety concerns that should have gotten more attention got buried under the “just trust us” messaging: the CDC and FDA themselves have acknowledged a rare risk of myocarditis in young males after mRNA vaccination, and a rare blood clotting disorder was confirmed with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Politicians like Morrison and Walz spent two years telling Minnesotans, including teenagers, to roll up their sleeves without straight answers about the risks. The parents who asked questions got dismissed. Turns out they were asking the right ones.
While Kelly Morrison was busy telling people what to do with their bodies, I was telling my clients the same thing I still believe: eat real food, drink water, get stronger, move every day. Building actual health, not mandates, is what gets people through a crisis. In my view, a lot of what we were told to do — masking up, gloving up, goggles at the grocery store — was theater more than it was science. It made people feel like something was being controlled. It didn’t make my clients healthier. Eating right, staying active, and building a strong immune system did.
And while Minnesotans were being told to fear each other over a mask, the money was walking out the back door. The Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to be a lifeline for small businesses like mine that got shut down by the state. Instead it turned into one of the biggest fraud free-for-alls in American history. Nationally, federal investigators found that as much as 17% of the trillion-dollar pool of PPP and EIDL money potentially went to fraudsters. Here in Minnesota, the SBA has already suspended nearly 7,000 borrowers tied to roughly $400 million in suspected fraudulent PPP and EIDL loans, and federal investigators say Minnesota’s broader pandemic-era fraud, tied to programs that operated under Walz’s watch, could total billions more. I was approved for a $60,000 PPP loan to help keep my business alive during the shutdown. I never saw a dime of it. Meanwhile, criminals with fake businesses and no employees walked away with millions. That’s the real legacy of “trust the government” during COVID: honest business owners like me got nothing, and the people gaming the system got rich.
Here’s what nobody in St. Paul wants to admit: we’re still cleaning up the mess. Businesses across Minnesota shut their doors during the lockdown and never came back. Prices never came back down. Inflation ate away at wages for years afterward. Businesses that survived the shutdown are still climbing out of the hole it put them in. And the people who cheered loudest for the shutdown, like Kelly Morrison, have never once had to answer for the cost — not the jobs lost, not the fraud that drained the very programs meant to help people like me.
I’m not a career politician. I’m a business owner who kept people employed through the worst of it, who watched my industry get crushed by decisions made by people who never had to worry about making payroll. Kelly Morrison is not a Dr. anymore, she’s spent her career in politics telling Minnesotans what was good for them. I’ve spent mine building things and living with the consequences of decisions like hers.
The gig is up. It’s time for accountability, not more of the same.
— Tyler Bass, Candidate for Congress, MN-03
