Scott Jensen and Matt Birk at a news conference outside the State Capitol in St. Paul on Thursday, June 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)

Matt Birk, Dr. Scott Jensen’s Republican running mate for his Minnesota gubernatorial campaign, is invested in 3M, a company which Jensen has repeatedly criticized in his vows to not accept any “Big Pharma” or “Big Tech” donations.

Birk, a former NFL football player and staunch critic of the government’s response to COVID-19, also reported owning stock in 19 large corporations, according to an economic interest statement he filed in June 2022. Many of these corporations made pharmaceuticals and COVID-19 personal protective equipment and testing supplies. 

In addition to 3M — which Jensen specifically called out at a rally in October 2021 for supporting the CDC’s masking guidelines while manufacturing 100 million masks per month, a “conflict of interest” — Birk is also invested in Abbott Laboratories, Accenture, Adobe Systems, Airbnb, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Autodesk, Honeywell, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard, McCormick, Meta Platforms (Facebook), Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Stryker Corporation, UnitedHealth Group and Visa.

Over the course of their gubernatorial campaign, Jensen has railed against these kinds of companies, claiming a Jensen-Birk administration will be an independent voice who still stand up against them.

“What are you gonna do about consumer protection in a day and age where you’ve got Big Tech and Big Pharma literally swamping us with their agenda?” Jensen said in a speech at the University of St. Thomas last December. 

He also said on a podcast in July 2021 that “in this country, we have this unholy, incestuous linkage between this triangle of Big Government, Big Pharma, and Big Tech.” He vowed not to accept any donations from these companies or their lobbyists in a radio interview last February.

“This is not a campaign fueled by the political elite. This is being fueled by We the People, who are saying collectively, we’ve had enough,” he said. “We’re seeing parents say, listen, we didn’t have our kids so that we could co-parent with the state. Get the heck out of our way.”

Jensen’s team did not respond to a request for comment about his choice for lieutenant governor being invested in these companies, potentially putting him in a position to influence state policy that could impact the value of his own investments.

Jensen is currently trailing behind his Democratic-Farmer-Labor opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in the polls, according to a recent survey from KSTP/SurveyUSA. Minnesota has not elected a Republican governor since 2006.