From News Nation:
“DOJ says no probe into
state-run nursing homes in New York”
The Justice Department has
decided not to open a civil rights investigation into government-run nursing
homes in New York over their COVID-19 response, according to a letter sent
Friday to several Republican members of Congress. Under former President Donald
Trump’s administration, the department’s civil rights division requested data
last August from four states — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan
— about the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths in public nursing homes. The
request came amid still-unanswered questions about whether some states,
especially New York, inadvertently worsened the pandemic death toll by
requiring nursing homes to accept residents previously hospitalized for COVID-19.
In a letter sent to several
Republicans who had demanded an investigation, Deputy Assistant Attorney
General Joe Gaeta said civil rights division lawyers had reviewed the data sent
by New York, along with additional information. “Based on that review, we have
decided not to open a CRIPA investigation of any public nursing facility within
New York at this time,” Gaeta wrote, referring to the federal Civil Rights of
Institutionalized Persons Act, which empowers the Justice Department to
investigate allegations about unlawful conditions in government-run residences.
The Justice Department sent similar letters earlier in the week to officials in
Pennsylvania and Michigan
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s spokesperson,
Richard Azzopardi, declined to comment. Cuomo, a Democrat, has previously
accused Trump’s Department of Justice of initiating the inquiry for purely
political reasons. He has also defended the decision to bar nursing homes from
rejecting COVID-19 patients during the worst weeks of the pandemic, saying the
state was desperate at the time to move recovering patients out of overwhelmed
hospitals.
Friday’s letter doesn’t address
the status of other Justice Department inquiries into how the Cuomo
administration handled data related to COVID-19 outbreaks at nursing homes. Federal
prosecutors have been examining the governor’s coronavirus task force and
trying to determine whether the state intentionally manipulated data regarding
nursing home deaths, The Associated Press previously reported. More than 15,800
people have died in nursing homes and assisted living residences in New York.
The state’s original count of the dead had been much lower because it had
excluded thousands of people who got infected in nursing homes, but died in
hospitals.
^ This just shows that the
Federal Government (ie the DOJ) is working with NYS and not for the American
people or the nursing home victims that Cuomo helped create. ^
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