Blue states lied: thousands of nursing home patients died

By: Daniel Greenfield

Over 7,000 of the country’s coronavirus deaths emerged out of nursing homes.

Of the 4,377 coronavirus deaths in New Jersey, over 1,700 died due to infections in nursing homes. That nearly 40% of coronavirus deaths in one of the hardest hit states took place in nursing homes casts a stark light on the misplaced priorities of blue states battling the pandemic by locking down houses of worship and small businesses, while putting few to no resources into protecting nursing home residents.

New Jersey’s coronavirus deaths were part of the coronavirus outbreak in 425 nursing homes. At one nursing home, after an anonymous tip, police found 17 bodies being stored in a shed.

Nearly 7,000 nursing home residents in the state have tested positive for coronavirus.

In neighboring New York, nearly 1 in 4 coronavirus deaths emerged from nursing homes. Those 3,060 deaths are only part of the story and represent an extremely incomplete picture. The Health Department had battled against releasing the information, claiming that it was protecting the privacy of residents. Even when the people pleading for the release of the information were their own loved ones.

In one facility, 17% of the residents have died. In 5 others, more than 10% are dead.

And even now, only data from a fraction of nursing homes in the state has been made public.

Why were New York authorities so reluctant to release the information? Even the partial data makes it all too clear that the severity of the death toll was not due to urban density, but poor oversight and response. If urban density were the issue, Manhattan would have some of the highest numbers. Instead it has among the lowest, while boroughs with sizable nursing homes have the highest numbers.

The actual nursing home death toll in New York may be closer to 3,316

In New York City, while the official numbers peg it at 688, the actual numbers may be over 2,000.

And the death toll, actual or estimated, is only a part of a bigger picture with 8% of nursing home residents in the state testing positive for the virus. Those numbers make it painfully clear that the dying is likely to continue and that authorities have utterly failed to secure our most vulnerable population.

The Cuomo administration is blaming nursing homes. And while nursing homes often provide poor care and personnel often work in different facilities at the same time spreading the infection between them, it was the state that ordered facilities to accept coronavirus patients returning from the hospital.

Governor Cuomo’s Department of Health had issued an order that, “no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19” and also prohibited requiring testing of returning patients. Sending hospitalized patients with coronavirus to the same mismanaged nursing homes was a death sentence for countless seniors in those facilities.

As Betsy McCaughey, the former Republican lieutenant governor, has said, “One Covid-positive patient in a nursing home produces carnage.”

Is it any wonder that the Department of Health obstructed the release of nursing home fatalities?

In Connecticut, 40% of coronavirus fatalities emerged from nursing homes.

In Virginia, the majority of the coronavirus outbreaks have taken place in nursing homes. Like New York, Virginia’s Department of Health is refusing to release the names of the facilities with outbreaks.

That means loved ones have no way to know if their families are at risk.

Governor Ralph Northam’s administration is continuing to engage in the cover-up even as a quarter of the population in one facility died of the coronavirus. That outbreak was the deadliest in America.

In Illinois, Governor Pritzker’s administration had fought against providing the numbers of deaths and the identity of the nursing homes with outbreaks by claiming that it was protecting the privacy of residents, but finally began putting out some numbers about coronavirus deaths in nursing homes.

1 in 4 coronavirus deaths in Cook County, an area which includes Chicago, took place in nursing homes.

In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration also refused to release the names of infected facilities. What information reporters have put together indicates that over a third of coronavirus deaths in Wayne County took place in nursing homes. Every nursing home in Detroit is infected.

“We have a crisis in our nursing homes,” Mayor Mike Duggan admitted, as 35% of nursing home residents tested had the virus.

In California, 29% of the deaths in Los Angeles County have taken place in nursing homes. In nearby Long Beach, it’s as high as 72%. In one Central Valley home, 156 residents tested positive and 8 died.

The Newsom administration, like its blue state counterparts, dragged its feet on releasing nursing home information, until its feet were held to the fire.

Governor Newsom is now claiming that nursing home residents are his top priority. “This state has a disproportionate number of aging and graying individuals, and we have a unique responsibility to take care of them and their caregivers.”

Except that California, like New York, was forcing care facilities to accept coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals. Newsom, like Cuomo, has blood on his manicured hands.

The ten deadliest outbreaks in this country have taken place in nursing homes and care facilities.

While officials around the country shut down churches and synagogues, arrested people for surfing and playing catch, and sent drones flying over their backyards, little was done to secure the estimated 4,100 nursing homes out of over 15,000 in the country where coronavirus was known to have taken root.

Even though the first coronavirus outbreak in this country took place in a nursing home in Washington, and killed 43 people, the CDC failed to track the spread of the virus to nursing homes nationwide.

Instead, the CDC has been relying on “informal outreach” to track the spread and has not updated its numbers since March.

The CDC’s estimate of 400 nursing homes is only about 10% of the national total.

The Trump administration took an important step by ordering nursing homes to report coronavirus deaths to the CDC, and to the residents and their families. This move puts an end to the state stonewalling that covered up coronavirus cases and their own malfeasance.

It’s the beginning. Not the end.

Coronavirus disproportionately affects the elderly and the ill. Securing nursing home facilities would cost a fraction of the money we have lost by shutting down the economy and passing massive bailouts. And as death tolls remain a major barrier to reopening the economy, saving lives in nursing homes will also save the economy. It’s the right thing to do for our parents, grandparents, and for our country.

Protecting nursing home residents isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier than shutting down America.

We don’t need to stop people from planting flowers in their yards or going to the beach. Instead, blue state and local governments, where the pandemic death toll is concentrated, failed to do the most basic and decent thing because it wasn’t in their political interest and didn’t offer the same alure of power.

Thousands of lives could have been saved if they had done the right thing. And they still can be.

Blue state governments lied, deliberately covering up the scale of nursing home deaths, while playing up the pandemic risks and the lockdown. Their decisions killed the weak and the elderly, devastated the economy, and transformed the entire relationship between the people and their governments.

The appeal of imposing social distancing measures on everyone proved irresistible to blue governments even while they neglected to track virus cases in the places where they were most likely to emerge.

At least 7,000 seniors paid the price. And, in our own ways, we all paid the price.

As the numbers trickle in from recalcitrant blue states, the truth is finally coming out. That truth should carry its own consequences for the bureaucrats who let so many die while chanting hollow slogans. It should also transform our coronavirus policy from the federal level to state and local governments.

Let the truth be spoken and let the lies fall.

(Front Page Mag)

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism

The newest mutation of antisemitism takes its place among reconstituted older forms, all of them perniciously making their appearances in a host of welcoming milieus

By: Phyllis Chesler

(The following article was reprinted with the permission of the Arutz Sheva editorial staff)

The Blood Libels against Israel and the Jews never seem to quit. Human Rights Watch, Gisha, IfNotNow, JVP, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR-I), Amnesty, etc. are all well funded to work full-time creating and spinning just such pernicious propaganda.

According to NGO Monitor, these NGOs claim that Israel is to blame—not Hamas, never Hamas—for “confining” or “caging” Palestinians in Gaza, denying them medical care, and “decimating Gaza’s health care sector.” Hamas’s choice to use their money to build tunnels, buy rockets, fund suicide killers, and their refusal to use monies to build infra-structure for their people, including hospitals, are never mentioned, nor is the fact that this virus “arrived in Gaza via students returning from Pakistan.” According to NGO Monitor:

“NGO campaigns on COVID-19 are simply a rebranding of the past 20 years of NGO anti-Israel hatred, repackaged to exploit the current global pandemic.”

However, equally pernicious, and perhaps as dispiriting, are the ways in which presumably high-quality scientific and medical journals, such as Lancet, have also published highly politicized non-truths in their pages. For example: That the alleged Israeli “occupation” of “Palestinian lands” has led to an increase in woman-battering on the West Bank and in Gaza.

The truth of Muslim women’s lives is better portrayed in a new film by veteran filmmaker Pierre Rehov. Child marriage, forced veiling, honor killing, and wife-beating are pandemic in Judea and Samaria (a.k.a. “West Bank” and Yehuda veShomron in Hebrew) as well as in Gaza and have absolutely nothing to do with Israel’s policies of self-defense. As of 2019-2020, Palestinian imams and terrorist leaders all support Sharia law for women. This means wife-chastisement for disobedience, and in Allah’s name—child marriage, polygamy, and veiling.

Given this larger picture, there are times I wish to escape to another world, a better one. But I can’t. When I pick up a literary magazines or read the mass (left stream) media I am met with a steady acidic drip-drip-drip of Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism. These days, no avid reader can hide from it.

For example, in an April, 2020 book review for the New York Review of Books—and on another subject entirely (“hipness,” the creation of celebrity, the Andy Warhol 80s), Luc Sante casually burnishes his own credentials by writing this: “Naturally, he (Glenn O’Brien, whose book Sante was reviewing) was a liberal; he despised Trump, the NRA, Israeli apartheid, the sanctioning of Cuba—he also despised burqas, on which he took the French government’s view.”

The absolutely false allegation of Israeli apartheid is right up there with prevailing left and liberal views of Trump and the NRA—those whom we are supposed to hate at all times and in all places.

On March 30, 2020, the New York Times published an obituary of Sol Kerzner, a very successful Jewish businessman and a leading opponent of real apartheid in South Africa—a man who worked with and for Nelson Mandela. Nevertheless, Kerzner is gratuitously described as “sharp elbowed” and as the “South African version of Donald J. Trump.” Supposedly questionable business dealings are trotted out. Kerzner is also described as someone who “profited hugely by circumventing the social and sexual strictures of apartheid.” Talk about no good deed going unpunished! Kerzner’s crime is that of relaxing apartheid rules for his gambling casinos and hotels, and profiting from doing so. (Shades of Jews and filthy lucre!) The obituary admits: “There, blacks and whites could do what was forbidden in the rest of South Africa: Mingle and frolic freely.”

I have read many NYT’s Obituaries for real estate salesmen and developers that do not sound like this.

For example, only two weeks later, on April 14th, the NYT’s ran an obituary of a real estate “player and philanthropist” named Robby Browne about whom only positive things were written. Like Mr. Kerzner, Browne also mingled with V.I.P.s and Hollywood celebrities but he was not “arrogant about his success.” Unlike the self-made Kerzner, Browne’s father attended Phillips Academy and Yale University; his mother “went from waltzing with society swans to selling mansions to them.” Browne was something of a blue-blood and he, too, attended Phillips Academy and both Princeton and Harvard. “He lived according to Gore Vidal’s principle that no one should ever turn down the opportunity to go on television or have sex.”

I doubt that blue-blooded Browne was Jewish.

May both real estate mavens rest in peace and may our cognitive warriors, our truth-tellers go from strength to strength.

                 ( Israel National News)

By: Richard Kemp

The coronavirus pandemic is a 9/11 moment. Al Qaida had been at war with the West for years before the destruction of the twin towers. But it took that barbarism to galvanise its largely supine prey into action.

Now we have Covid-19. Unlike 9/11 we have seen no evidence so far that China deliberately unleashed this virus on the world. There is certainly evidence, however, that it resulted from the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and that Beijing’s habitually duplicitous and criminally irresponsible actions allowed it to spread around the globe, leading to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on. The reality, in Beijing’s book, is that the cold war between China and the West, which began with the communist seizure of China in 1949, never ended. Despite the Sino-Soviet split and subsequent US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s, for the Chinese leadership the US was still the implacable enemy.

Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

China today is by far the greatest threat to Western values, freedom, economy, industry, communications and technology. It threatens our very way of life. China’s objective is to push back against the US and become the dominant world power by 2049, a century after the creation of the People’s Republic. Dictator for life Xi Jinping has no intention of doing this through military conflict. His war is not fought on the battlefield but in the boardroom, the markets, the press, universities, cyberspace and in the darkest shadows.

Those who argue China’s right to compete with the West in free markets and on a level playing field seem not to comprehend that Beijing has no free market and no intention of playing on a level field. The world’s leading executioner, China is an incomparably ruthless dictatorship that tortures, disappears and imprisons its people at will and controls its massive population through a techno-surveillance infrastructure that it’s busy exporting around the world to extend its political and economic control to us.

For decades, China has been working on its three-pronged strategy: building its economy and fighting capability, including intelligence, technology, cyber and space as well as hard military power; developing global influence to exploit resources and secure control; thrusting back and dividing the US and its capitalist allies.

China has built its economy on Western money and at Western expense, by industrial-scale theft of intellectual property and technology, copyright violation, illicit data mining, cyberwar, deceit, duplicity, enslavement and uncompromising state control of industry and commerce. It continues to expand its already immense influence through a Belt and Road Initiative that marches across the globe; massive investment in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia and north and south America; and direct aggression in the Pacific including the South China Sea (where Beijing’s artificial island programme has created one of the greatest ecological disasters in history).

All of this is supported by a multi-million dollar propaganda operation, in President Xi’s words: “to tell China’s story well” — in other words: to advance the ideology of the CCP everywhere. This includes buying support or silence from global media outlets, threats and coercion. Just one high profile example of this influence occurred last year when the US National Basketball Association was forced to make a grovelling public apology after the Houston Rockets’ general manager tweeted in support of pro-democracy campaigners in Hong Kong.

Although military conflict is not China’s preferred strategic instrument, Beijing has not neglected fighting capabilities, spending an estimated $230 billion annually, second only to the US. Xi has been rebuilding his forces on an unprecedented scale, with particular emphasis on a naval war with America. Planned military contingency options also include moves against Taiwan and other territories it intends to control directly. China has also now become the second biggest arms seller in the world, including to countries subject to UN sanctions such as North Korea and Iran. This month, 15 armoured vehicles were delivered to Nigeria, including VT-4 main battle tanks, already in service with the Royal Thai Army and, like most of China’s defence equipment, incorporating technology stolen from the West. China’s arms exports are not motivated primarily by revenue generation, but as a means to impose influence and control, create proxies and challenge the US.

Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the United Kingdom, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei, to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5’s repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.

The Chinese government has spent billions of dollars establishing Confucius Institutes around the world, mainly at universities. There are over 500 globally, including 29 in the UK and over 70 in the US. Ostensibly aimed at promoting Chinese culture, these bodies are used to infiltrate universities and high schools to indoctrinate students in communist ideology, as well as for espionage activities. More than 100,000 Chinese are studying in the UK. Last year, MI5 and GCHQ warned universities their research and computer systems are under threat from Chinese intelligence assets among these students. The Director of the FBI , Christopher Wray, said recently that China was aggressively exploiting US academic openness to steal technology, using “campus proxies” and establishing “institutes on our campuses.” More broadly he concluded that “no country poses a greater threat to the US than Communist China.”

A senior CCP official unguardedly admitted the Confucius Institutes are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up”. Increasingly reliant on foreign funding, Western universities have been pressured by Chinese officials to censor debate on politically explosive issues such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen Square.

Few in the West fully recognise the threat to our own economies, security and liberty. Many who do refuse to speak out for four reasons. First, fear of coming into China’s crosshairs, provoking economic harm or character assassination. Second, fear of accusations of racism, a concern readily exploited by the Chinese state whose own egregious racism is only too obvious. Third, belief that our liberal values can change those that oppose us. The hope that Chinese exposure to free trade, including entry into the WTO in 2001, would have this effect has proven woefully misguided and served only to strengthen Beijing’s oppressive regime. Fourth, many political leaders, businessmen, academics and journalists have been bought and paid for by Beijing whether by financial incentive or blackmail.

How can the West fight back? Although still militarily and economically inferior to the US, China is a formidable and growing economic power, interwoven with Western economies to an unprecedented degree. We must begin to divest from and sanction China, repatriate and use alternative sources of manufacturing and technology, restrict capital investment there and curb Chinese investment here, especially in our infrastructure.

We must re-invigorate and develop our own technology, much long abandoned to the Chinese juggernaut. We must enforce the norms of international trade and act vigorously to prevent and penalise China’s orgy of industrial theft that has gone largely unchallenged for decades. We must push back globally against Beijing’s imperialism and propaganda wherever it occurs. We must also prepare for military conflict, with an emphasis on deterring Chinese aggression.

America will have to lead the fightback as it did previously in the cold war, but success will require Europe and our allies around the world to stand with them for the long term. This is not a party political issue, but must become a fundamental element of enduring Western grand strategies. This is the task of decades and will be high-risk and costly. The alternative is to remain on the hook and in hock to the Chinese communist state and let future generations suffer the incalculable consequences of our continued purblind inaction.

   (Gatestone Institute)

Colonel (ret.) Richard Kemp commanded British forces in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.