New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has stealthily attempted to rewrite history, deleting his controversial order requiring nursing homes to admit Covid-19 patients from the state health website and blaming facilities for obeying it.
After being lambasted in the press for the March 25 executive order that forced New York elder care facilities to accept patients infected with the highly contagious virus, Cuomo attempted to blame the nursing homes for not disobeying his orders during a Wednesday press conference.
“The obligation is on the nursing home to say, ‘I can’t take a Covid-positive person,’” the governor insisted. “If they said ‘I can’t take the person,’ they can’t take the person! So that’s how it works.”
The coronavirus has cut a devastating swath through New York’s nursing homes, killing more than 5,800 people in long-term care facilities since the pandemic began - nearly a fifth of the state’s Covid-19 deaths so far, according to AP statistics compiled on Thursday. The policy ultimately sent over 4,500 recovering coronavirus patients to nursing homes, which Cuomo himself called “the optimum feeding ground for this virus.”
But the executive order itself leaves little room for disobedience, reading (in underlined text, no less), “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [Nursing Home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.” Elsewhere in the document, facilities are advised they “must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals” so long as they’ve been deemed medically stable - no excuses allowed. Facilities aren’t even permitted to test incoming patients.
https://twitter.com/commonsense258/status/1265704776089718784/photo/1
But that same order, titled “Advisory: Hospital Discharges and Admissions to Nursing Homes,” was apparently removed from the New York healthcare website early this month, according to Fox News, which discovered its absence on Tuesday. Unfortunately for Cuomo’s revisionism, it’s still available in the Wayback Machine. The governor issued a revised directive on May 10, barring hospitals from sending patients back to nursing homes unless they tested negative for the virus. However, his communications director denied the more recent order represented a "reversal" of the old one so much as "build[ing] on" it.
By Saturday, however, Cuomo was blaming the Trump administration for the ill-advised Covid-19 mandate, declaring New York was merely “following the president's agencies' guidance” and “follow[ing] what the Republican Administration said to do.” While the governor's office claimed he was referring to a March directive from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, that order merely required nursing homes to “admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including...from hospitals where a case of Covid-19 was present” and even advised setting aside a unit to quarantine patients returning from hospitals - a safety measure notably missing from Cuomo's executive order.
The New York governor’s handling of the nursing home situation has gotten decidedly mixed reviews, with a recent poll showing just 44 percent of state voters approve of the job he’s done managing the virus in state elder care facilities - while 48 percent give him a thumbs-down. Published Wednesday, the Siena College poll reveals a predictable partisan split, with 54 percent of Democrats approving of how he’s managed the nursing home problem as opposed to 55 percent of Republicans disapproving. Independents were the most vehement in their disdain, with 61 percent viewing his response negatively.
Cuomo’s overall approval ratings have also slipped since the early days of the pandemic, when he won over Democrats by taking an oppositional stance to President Donald Trump. Approval for his handling of the outbreak in general sits at 76 percent for May, down from 84 percent last month, while his overall job approval rating has slid to 63 percent from 71 percent in April.
Krystal Ball: CNN, MSNBC CAUGHT covering for catastrophic Cuomo mistake
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As the WHO and prestigious medical journal the Lancet back away from questionable data provided by healthcare analytics firm Surgisphere, ulterior motives for the rush to demonize hydroxychloroquine become clear.
The World Health Organization (WHO) sheepishly resumed testing the off-patent malaria drug hydroxychloroquine on coronavirus patients on Wednesday after pausing that arm of its ‘Solidarity’ clinical trial based on data that appeared to show the drug contributed to higher death rates among test subjects. That data, it turned out, came from a tiny US healthcare analytics firm called Surgisphere, and calling it faulty would be excessively charitable.
Not only is Surgisphere a company lacking in medical expertise – its employees included an “adult” entertainer and a science-fiction writer – but its CEO Sapan Desai co-authored two of the damning studies that used the firm’s data to smear hydroxychloroquine, already thoroughly demonized in the media thanks to its promotion by US President Donald Trump, as a killer. All data is sourced to a proprietary database supposedly containing a veritable ocean of real-time, detailed patient information yet curiously absent from existing medical literature.
The Surgisphere-tainted study appeared to show increased risk of in-hospital deaths and heart problems with no disease-fighting benefits, confirming the suspicions of medical-industry naysayers already inclined to hate the off-patent drug due to the lack of profit potential and Trump’s incessant boosterism. Italy, France, and Germany rushed to ban hydroxychloroquine, citing “an increased risk for adverse reactions with little or no benefit.”
But such a shameless character assassination performed against a potentially-lifesaving drug – especially one with a decades-long track record of safety in malaria, lupus, and arthritis patients that came highly recommended by some of the world’s most eminent disease experts, including France’s Didier Raoult – could only be accomplished with help from industry prejudice. It required ignoring numerous existing studies showing hydroxychloroquine was beneficial in treating early-stage Covid-19 patients, as well as anecdotal reports from thousands of doctors who’d successfully used it.
It also required trusting a fly-by-night company with next to no internet or media presence to make decisions that could affect the lives of millions of people. It’s not like there weren’t warning signs Surgisphere was something other than the top-notch medical analytics firm it presented itself as. The company began life as a textbook publisher in 2008 and hired most of its 11 employees two month ago, according to an investigation by the Guardian, yet it claimed ownership of a massive international database of 96,000 patients in 1,200 hospitals worldwide. One expert interviewed by the outlet said it would be difficult for even a national statistics agency to do in years what Surgisphere had supposedly done in weeks, calling the database “almost certainly a scam.” Yet no one at the Lancet or WHO thought to look a gift horse in the mouth – not when that gift drove a stake through the heart of hydroxychloroquine as Covid-19 treatment.
And while Australian researchers found flaws in the Surgisphere data just days after the May 22 publication of the Lancet study, noting that the number of Covid-19 deaths cited by the study as coming from five hospitals exceeded the entirety of Covid-19 deaths recorded in Australia at that time, the Lancet – instead of investigating just who this Surgisphere company really was, and why it had made such a glaring mistake – merely published a minor retraction related to the Australian data and put the controversy to bed.
The full-frontal assault on hydroxychloroquine was instead allowed to continue unchecked in the media, as mainstream outlets focused their energies on fluffing up remdesivir – a costly, untested drug manufactured by drug maker Gilead that has so far produced lackluster results in clinical trials – and stumping for an eventual vaccine. Hydroxychloroquine’s off-patent status meant it was a dead end as far as profits were concerned, while remdesivir and whatever vaccine is ultimately green-lighted will make a lot of people very rich. Perhaps hoping to throw their audiences off the real reason for their hydroxychloroquine hatred, several outlets hinted that Trump stood to make money off the drug (which costs about 60 cents per pill) – but even Snopes, no fan of the ‘Bad Orange Man’, had to pour cold water on that speculation.
The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine have – belatedly – published “expressions of concern” about the Surgisphere hydroxychloroquine study, and an independent audit is being conducted. But the problem of biased health authorities selectively embracing some trial results while rejecting others is unlikely to stop there.
The Lancet study is hardly the only one to show hydroxychloroquine lacks efficacy in treating Covid-19. Multiple studies conducted by the US National Institutes of Health on hospitalized (i.e. severely-ill) coronavirus patients have yielded poor results, but even the drug’s most ardent evangelists acknowledge it doesn’t help end-stage or very sick patients. Raoult has even claimed France banned the drug’s use in all but the most severely ill patients in order to discredit it as a treatment. The US National Institutes of Health was publishing studies in its journal Virology touting chloroquine as “a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection” as far back as 2005, yet ‘coronavirus czar’ Anthony Fauci throws shade at the drug whenever he gets a chance.
As long as deadly diseases like Covid-19 are seen as profit sources first and human rights issues second (or third, or tenth…), treatments that aren’t profitable will always be marginalized in favor of costly and frequently less-effective pharmaceuticals. Drug industry profiteering has already killed hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people in the US alone. Taking the profit motive out of healthcare can help ensure its body count stays as low as possible.
^^^
I trust RT about as much a Voice of America radio. So I call Bullshit.
and therein lies the problem.^^^
I trust RT about as much a Voice of America radio. So I call Bullshit.
Orgy's are now legal!we are opening up the swimming pools again on monday
schools are going back to full classes. our virus advisor who the gov dragged out of retirement to deal with the pandemic has been let go back into retirement.
the borders are opening to tourists again on the 16th. we still have the distancing rules but no one is really being strict about it anymore. even erotic services are to be allowed again as of the 8th lmao. they said it was happening anyway and they wanted the sex workers to have legal work protections. we are now allowed to meet up, with up to 30 random people.
hell, yes! open up! Texas did, and is now showing more cases. wonderful...