Dr. Howard Zucker had his name on the infamous ‘Cuomo Death Order’ that has been blamed for the deaths of thousands of nursing residents.
The New York State Health Department’s order stated that
“no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission” to a nursing
home “solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”
It even banned nursing homes from testing incoming patients to prevent
cases from being detected.
In nursing homes that complied with the order, residents swiftly began dying. By the end of the pandemic, 15% of the state’s nursing home residents were dead.
Over
9,000 infected patients were sent into nursing homes and over 15,000
nursing home residents died. The outcome surprised no one. Christopher
Laxton, the head of the
Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, noted that Cuomo
and Zucker, “unaccountably failed to include clinical expertise in
operational leadership when these policies were formed and we don’t know
why.”
New York’s Health Department not only caused the deaths of
thousands of people, it tried to cover it up by listing only those who
died inside facilities, not those who died after being taken to a
hospital. Zucker was aware of
the real numbers, but their release was blocked for months to protect
Cuomo. It finally took a lawsuit and a judicial order to release and
expose the information.
The true numbers boosted the actual death rate between 40% to 68%.
Cuomo
aides rewrote Health Department reports to make their boss look good. A
Cuomo aide later admitted that the numbers had been kept hidden over
fears of a Justice Department investigation into the state’s nursing
home deaths.
Dr. Zucker was New York’s Fauci. He became the
public face of Cuomo’s pandemic response and defended his actions and
those of his boss. The Department of Health countered the outrage over
its policies by releasing a report exonerating
itself for the thousands of deaths that was shredded by
epidemiologists, statisticians and health care professionals of all
kinds.
At a legislative session, Zucker argued that the virus
“was inadvertently brought into the nursing homes” and that it happened
because “we did not know enough about the science”. The “science” behind
respiratory viruses infecting people that they are in close contact
with has been known long before Zucker was born.
An audit by the State Comptroller’s office found that the Health Department had interfered with the audit and that top leaders had misled the public.
The
FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office opened an investigation into the
release of false nursing home deaths numbers. FBI agents interviewed top
Health Department officials which doubtlessly would have included Dr.
Howard Zucker.
During a State Senate hearing, Zucker refused to answer questions by claiming that he could not talk about it because it was the subject of a federal investigation.
29 days after Gov. Andrew Cuomo was forced to resign, his health commissioner followed him out the door.
Attorney General Letita James described it as, “the end of a difficult chapter for our state.”
While
Gov. Hochul corruptly praised Zucker, Senator Gustavo Rivera, a
Democrat who had fought for accountability over the pandemic deaths,
stated that, “his resignation is warranted and another step towards
ensuring we hold those who neglected their duties under the Cuomo
administration accountable.”
The Empire Center, whose litigation forcing the release of the nursing home death numbers helped lead to the investigation, described Zucker as leaving “marred by scandal over his role in managing the coronavirus pandemic.”
With a record like that, where could Dr. Howard Zucker get a job?
Zucker
had been joined at the hip to a disgraced governor ousted over his
misconduct. He had been at the epicenter of what elected officials and
even the media had called a cover-up and that had resulted in an FBI
investigation.
But Zucker did not stay unemployed for long. He
was hired on as Chief Medical Officer at Color Health, a company that
had specialized in COVID tests, did some teaching at local universities
and then became a Deputy Director at the CDC.
Zucker now wields
“broad operating authority and responsibility for overall planning,
direction, and management of global strategy and programs across CDC”.
The
bio reduces Zucker’s role in the pandemic to one word: sandwiched
between “many public health crises” including Ebola, Zika, COVID-19,
measles, AIDS and “e-cigarette contamination”. There is no mention of
nursing home deaths or FBI investigations. COVID-19 now occupies eight
characters in Zucker’s extensive bio somewhere between measles and
e-cigarettes. Like the thousands of dead nursing home residents, the
COVID part of Zucker’s background was buried.
Zucker is not the
only former state health director who shoved infected patients into
nursing homes to get a second chance from the Biden administration.
Pennsylvania’s Dr. Richard Levine also oversaw an order that forced nursing homes to accept COVID infected patients. Meanwhile, Levine took his own mother out of a nursing home. Over 2,500 nursing home patients died in the state.
Biden
made Levine his Assistant Secretary for Health and an admiral. Levine
has gotten far more attention for claiming to be a woman named Rachel
and lecturing on the importance of transgenderizing children than for
the deaths of 2,529 human beings.
Robert Gordon, the head of Michigan’s Department of Health & Human Services, where infected patients were also forced into nursing homes, has become the Chief Financial Officer for the Department of Health and Human Services.
During
a hearing, Gordon claimed that putting infected patients into nursing
homes actually “reduced deaths”. He argued that the state was unprepared
because “the president and the White House concealed information about
the level of risk posed by coronavirus.”
Michigan’s Office of the Auditor General conducted an audit
that found that there were actually 8,061 COVID nursing home deaths:
thousands more than the official numbers that had come out of the
state’s health department.
The men who oversaw the policies that
infected and killed nursing home patients not only suffered no
consequences for their actions, but received promotions that took them
from presiding over state health agencies to national ones.
The mini-Faucis of the state have stepped into Fauci’s place.
The
Biden administration’s health bureaucracy is overseen by the state
health directors who filled cemeteries with dead elders. And even those,
like Zucker, who lost their jobs, have found better ones working for
Joe Biden. No amount of scandals, shame or outrage has kept them from
the pinnacle of the public health bureaucracy where they can do to the
country what they did to a few states.
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