COVID Public Health Policies Are Killing the Elderly, Deliberately
Phase I: “Fire Through Dry Grass”
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The pandemic has exposed underlying, inhumane, Eugenics-driven public health policies. The shocking evidence is that those public health policies were implemented in the most developed, economically wealthy countries. Those with the highest standard of living denied medical treatment for elderly nursing home residents, essentially condemning them to death.[1]
Half of all European COVID-19-related deaths have occurred among residents in nursing homes: A report by the London School of Economics found that in Italy, France, Ireland, Spain and Belgium between 42 percent and 57 percent of deaths from the virus have taken place in nursing homes.[2] In Italy, people call it the “silent massacre.”[3]
In the UK, more than 20,000 residents of care homes died from Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic. The decision to discharge thousands of hospital patients into care homes in the spring, in order to free up hospital beds and protect the National Health Service, was likely to blame. Some MPs accused the Government of throwing care homes ‘to the wolves’.[4]
In the US, 2.1 million people live in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. They constitute 0.6% of the population. Yet, more than 174,000 elderly residents and staff in nursing home facilities died as of March 2021.[5] Their deaths represent 34% of Covid-19 deaths. A report by the American Association of Retired People (AARP) found that many of those deaths could have been prevented.[6] Multiple factors contributed: the legal, financial, and bureaucratic structure of government-funded, nursing homes. Medicare pays for short-term rehabilitation, but not long-term care. The federal funding restriction makes nursing homes the only option for most people who are in need of long-term care.
- Since 70% of nursing homes are for-profit, they are clearly profitable.
Understaffed and under equipped nursing homes were completely unprepared. In response to public furor about the mounting deaths, the federal government sent over $21 billion in federal relief funds, to nursing homes, according to CMS. But only $2.5 billion was specifically allotted for infection control.
- More than $18.5 billion in taxpayer money was dispensed to nursing home owners – with no no strings, no accountability.
The Italians called it the “silent massacre”. Politico reported 34 Italian families joined forces and filed a lawsuit against a nursing home for attempted murder and mishandling the epidemic, after 150 residents were hospitalized and 66 died.[7]
A woman in Milan describes her mother’s final days:
“In the days before, they told us that they gave her oxygen, but then a person who worked inside the facility sent my sister a video of our mom in bed. In the video she didn’t have oxygen, she was without blankets, and her arms were blue…”
Five US governors – all of who are Democrats – issued executive orders that essentially condemned the elderly in nursing homes to death — some have called it the nursing home slaughter.
They are: Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Gretchen Whitman of Michigan, Cavin Newsom of California and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania.[8]
Gov. Cuomo was the first to issue an Executive Order on March 25th in which he directed hospitals not treat elderly patients. He directed them to send infected and not-infected elderly patients to nursing homes, which were prohibited from refusing to accept Covid-infected elderly people. The crisis prompted President Trump to send the Navy’s “floating lifesaver” hospital ship, Norfolk, which was equipped with 80 ICU beds, 12 operating rooms, a blood bank, a medical laboratory, a pharmacy, an optometry lab and a CT scanner. It had a 1,000 bed capacity.[9] The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was directed to stablish a second large emergency hospital at the Javits Center. It also had a 1,000 bed capacity.[10]
Javits Center Emergency hospital
Both emergency hospitals: the Norfolk and Javits Center remained 90% empty — even after nursing home managers and eldercare center administrators pleaded with Gov. Cuomo to allow them to send coronavirus-infected patients to these emergency hospitals rather than admit them to facilities filled with elderly patients far more susceptible to contracting the disease.
An investigative report by ProPublica (June 2020) documented damning evidence that Governor Cuomo understood the threat Covid-19 posed for nursing home residents, which he described it as “Fire Through Dry Grass”.[11] Cuomo issued an executive order directing hospitals to transfer elderly patients into nursing homes that he knew were ill prepared to treat or to contain the spread of infection. ProPublica reported that he issued the order AFTER indemnifying hospitals and nursing homes from all liability, his largest campaign contributors. NYS Department of Health underreported the number of nursing home casualties.
Janice Dean, a Fox News meteorologist, whose parents-in-law died after being infected with the virus in a New York nursing home, wrote an essay for foxnews.com, stating:
“We lost them both to COVID last spring as the virus ravaged their long-term care facilities who put infected patients into the places where our most vulnerable resided.”
Andrew Cuomo’s callous disregard for the intrinsic value of human life encapsulates the essence of Eugenics.
More than 15,000 elderly New Yorkers died in nursing homes, constituting close to half of all Covid deaths in NYS.
The other NY Covid scandal involves hazardous, overcrowded conditions and sub-standard care at hospitals that serve racial and ethnic minorities. Case in point: Elmhurst Hospital
Dr. Ben McVane, Elmhurst’s emergency medicine specialist described the desperate living conditions of the people living in Elmhurst and Corona, in an OpEd in the New York Times:
“The people living around Elmhurst Hospital are … dependent on a public hospital system that is already overstretched and underfunded. I’m a doctor at the epicenter of the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.”
Elmhurst Hospital
Erin Olszewski, a nurse and Army veteran, described the chaos at Elmhurst in her book, as Worse Than A War Zone. She described how Covid positive patients were intermingled with undiagnosed patients; thereby spreading the infection within the hospital. At the same time, the emergency hospitals that had been set up on the battleship Comfort, and the Javits Center to treat Covid-infected patients – including nursing home residents remained relatively empty.[13]
Olszewski raised one of the most serious issues that the media has failed to investigate: Why was Hydroxychloroquine, an effective anti-malarial drug was banned from use against Covid-19?
“in New York, the doctors were not able to prescribe hydroxychloroquine. And, the main treatment in New York City in Elmhurst Hospital was to essentially put these patients on a vent[ilator]. And, For example, I’m from Florida. My hospital was successfully treating patients with the hydroxychloroquine and the zinc with a completely different number of deaths.”
In late March, Dr. Colleen Smith, an emergency doctor at Elmhurst, sounded the alarm in a video which exposed the conditions in the hospital. The facility was running low on personal protective equipment (PPE) for its staff, and running low on nurses, on doctors, on ventilators, and even on medication. Two nurses at the hospital, Elizabeth, critical care nurse, and Leyla described the extremely stressful conditions and exposure of both medical workers and patients to infection because of the lack of basic safeguards. Elizabeth talked about the stress:
“It’s very depressing, you take care of these patients all day long, and the next day you come in and they’re gone…The exposure of the medical workers to infection is also heightened by the lack of negative pressure rooms. “I’m sure a lot more of us are positive because we don’t have negative pressure rooms. You need negative pressure rooms for COVID-19 patients because this is an airborne disease. Negative pressure rooms make it a lot less likely that you get infected.”
Leyla described the fear:
“Once you enter the hospital, everything changes. It feels like a dangerous, frightening movie.
It’s fear, once we’re in the hospital we feel scared. So many of the nurses have kids, the kids are small and are looking for answers. They have the same look. And the cleaning people too, in everyone’s faces you can see fear. No one wants to work, but we feel that we have to.
Not that many people call out sick, and that’s the thing that I like. Everyone has that feeling that they’re needed. I spoke to PCA [Personal Care] nurses, they’re nurses that clean the patients, and they told me that yes they feel scared, and that they could die, but when they come to work at least they get the joy of knowing that they’re helping someone.”[12]
Cuomo’s response to the virus outbreak in early March was to request 30,000 ventilators. The use of those ventilators resulted in increasing, rather than decreasing the number of deaths. Olszewski raises the question:
“How would he know [in early March] that we would need 30,000 vents beats me. All I know is that was at the patients’ expense.”
Olszewski has called for a federal investigation alleging fraud, negligence, and greed as having led to preventable deaths at Elmhurst Hospital.[14]
- An investigation by Letitia James, New York State Attorney General, confirmed the ProPublica report. The Jan 28th AG report conclusion was devastating.
- Cuomo and his administration had lied and concealed 50% of the actual number of human beings that he so callously condemned to death.[15]
- Andrew Cuomo’s response to the AG’s damning report:
“Who cares if they died in the nursing home or in the hospital? They died/”[16]
As of Jan. 19th at least 12,743 long-term care residents died of the virus — far greater than the official tally of 8,505 on that day. Melissa DeRosa, Gov. Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing home death toll from COVID-19. She said “we froze” out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors.[17]
When his unconscionable actions were exposed, Cuomo invoked “toxic political environment… the void was created…was filled with skepticism, cynicism, and conspiracy theories which furthered confusion.”
The New York Times recently exposed Cuomo’s behind the scenes maneuvers to pitch a self-promoting book– while his senior staff was busy concealing the number of nursing home deaths by altering the number in a NYS Health Department Covid report.
Furthermore, the Times reports that Cuomo didn’t actually write the book for which he is reported to have negotiated a $4 million contract. The Times reports that Cuomo relied “on a cadre of trusted aides and junior staffers for everything from full-scale edits to minor clerical work [on the book], potentially running afoul of state laws prohibiting use of public resources for personal gain.” [18]
Throughout the pandemic, as the death toll rose as a result of his Executive Order, Andrew Cuomo disseminated propaganda in his daily televised performances, which were presented as Coronavirus “briefings”. His performance netted him the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which represents the global broadcasting industry, bestowed its annual International Emmy award on Cuomo “in recognition for his leadership and masterful use of TV to inform people around the world.”.
The Academy leadership and the global broadcasting industry demonstrated total disregard for the thousands of people that Andrew Cuomo’s Executive Order condemned to death.[19] The Academy bestowed an award that purportedly “recognizes an individual who crosses cultural boundaries to touch our common humanity.”
The Academy President and CEO, Bruce L. Paisner, a Harvard College alumnus, and former President of Hearst Communications, is a member of the power elite, including the Council on Foreign Relations. Like Cuomo, Paisner and the Academy displayed utter lack of moral values. Their award signifies an endorsement of the eugenics-precept that declares some human beings’ lives to be expendable…. As the Nazis put it, “lives unworthy of life”.
A follow-up report by ProPublica, dated Feb 12th, states:
“After months of requests from state lawmakers, subpoenas from Congress and a lawsuit by the Empire Center, the Cuomo administration in recent weeks had finally begun to concede that thousands more nursing home residents had died of COVID-19 than previously made public.” However, Cuomo is Still Underreporting the Total Count of Covid Nursing Home Deaths.
Bill Hammond, an analyst with the Empire Center, said that to date, recent state disclosures of all deaths of nursing home residents, whether they perished in their facilities or at local hospitals:
“failed to include more than 650 deaths of people presumed to have died of COVID-19 For instance, Hammond said the state has still not released the dates and facility names of close to 1,000 COVID-19 deaths involving residents of adult care facilities other than nursing homes. The numbers of those residents known to have died of COVID-19 jumped from 219 to close to 1,800 when the state released its data on hospital deaths.”
Feb 17th: The FBI and US Attorney have begun an investigation into how Gov Cuomo’s Administration handled the state’s nursing home crisis during the coronavirus pandemic.
Members of Cuomo’s task force include NYS Health Commissioner Howard Zucker and Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa. The New York Post reported that DeRosa admitted, in an online meeting with NYS legislators and administration officials, that the governor’s team withheld data related to the number of COVID-19-related deaths at nursing homes out of concern it could be “used against us” in a federal probe.
“Basically, we froze, because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice or what we give to you guys, what we start saying was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.”
According to the U.S. Long-Term Care COVID Tracker, less than 1% of America’s population lives in long-term care facilities, but as of Feb 11th this tiny fraction of the country accounts for 36% of US COVID-19 deaths. According to AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard, more than 174,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities died.
CDC Covid Tracking Poject finds 40% of all US Covid deaths are Black or Hispanic[20].
“Facts About Covid-19”, an overview by Swiss Policy Research (February 2021) documents the death toll for elderly people in long-term care facilities in North America, Western Europe, Israel and Australia. The facts are based on data analyses by the Wall Street Journal and Johns Hopkins University.[21]
The extraordinary high mortality rate, for the elderly people in nursing homes, is the result of public health policies – not nature!
In Canada, 72% of Covid-19 deaths are the elderly in nursing homes, in Spain, 59% of Covid deaths are in nursing homes; in Belgium 57%; in the Netherlands 49%; in Sweden 47%; and in Australia, of the 908 Covid-19 deaths, 75% were nursing home residents.[22]
Colorado Nursing home residents protest “Rather die from Covid than loneliness”
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Notes
[3] https://www.politico.eu/article/the-silent-coronavirus-covid19-massacre-in-italy-milan-lombardy-nursing-care-homes-elderly; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/half-of-coronavirus-deaths-happen-in-care-homes-data-from-eu-suggests
[4] Coronavirus Outbreaks Kill Dozens At Care Homes: 24 Elderly Residents Die In Hampshire While Second Tragedy In The Midlands Leaves Nine Dead, Chris Jewers, Daily Mail, Jan 28, 2021
[5] More than 1.8 million older people are housed in 16, 000 nursing homes. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursing-home-care.htm; https://www.elderneedslaw.com/blog/how-many-older-adults-will-wind-up-in-skilled-nursing-homes ; https://health.usnews.com/health-news/best-nursing-homes/articles/nursing-home-facts-and-statistics
[6] Who’s to Blame for the 100,000 COVID Dead in Long-Term Care? AARP, Dec 3, 2020
[7] https://www.agi.it/cronaca/news/2020-04-16/rsa-mediglia-denuncia-famiglie-8349428/ Translation: For the RSA of Mediglia Comes the Compaint of 34 Families.
[8] Five Governors Besides Cuomo Who Sent COVID-19-Positive Patients Into Nursing Homes, Washington Examiner, Mar 1, 2021
[9] Nearly 90% Of The US Navy Hospital Ship In New York Is Empty Amid Coronavirus Fight, CNBC, APR 17 2020
[10] A Look Inside The Javits Center’s New Coronavirus Hospital, Ben Cohn, Bruce Golding and Julia Marsh, New York Post, Mar 27, 2020
[11] Fire Through Dry Grass”: Andrew Cuomo Saw COVID-19’s Threat to Nursing Homes. Then He Risked Adding to It, Pro Publica, June 2020; https://ahrp.org/institutionalized-racial-bias-in-public-health-inferior-care-callous-disregard-increased-deaths
[12] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/09/elmh-a09.html
[15] Attorney General James Releases Report on Nursing Homes’ Response to COVID-19, Jan 28, 2021; https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021-nursinghomesreport-final.pdf
[16] https://nypost.com/2021/01/29/gov-cuomo-blames-politics-amid-covid-19-nursing-home-report/
[17] https://nypost.com/2021/02/11/cuomo-aide-admits-they-hid-nursing-home-data-from-feds/
[18] As Cuomo Sought $4 Million Book Deal, Aides Hid Damaging Death Toll. Jesse McKinley, Danny Hakim and Alexandra Alter, The New York Times, Mar 31, 2021
[19] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/11/21/937445923/andrew-cuomo-to-receive-international-emmy-for-masterful-covid-19-briefings
[20] https://covidtracking.com/nursing-homes-long-term-care-facilities
[21] https://swprs.org/covid19-facts/
[22] https://swprs.org/covid19-facts
