Cuomo and Zucker Continue Lies About Nursing Home Deaths

NY Take Action: Second nursing home hearing today. Will Cuomo finally tell us how many died?

From John Gilmore & Autism Action Network

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August 10, 2020 — The New York Assembly and Senate held a hearing last Monday on the covid 19 diaster in nursing homes. Another hearing on covid 19 is scheduled for today, Monday, August 10 at 10 am. The primary witness last week was Health Commissioner Howard Zucker. He used every trick in the book to avoid answering questions. He rambled on about irrelevant data. He preceded “answers” with detailed, but pointless, preambles. He answered questions that were not asked. He used every bureaucratic trick in the book to avoid saying anything of substance. And when directly questioned on the most important question of the day: How many people got ill with covid 19 in nursing homes but died in hospitals? He just simply refused to answer, saying he wanted to be sure he gave them a precise answer and would not even attempt an approximation.

Nursing industry insiders have said they believe the death count in the hospitals is at least eual to the deaths in the nursing homes and probably greater, which puts the nursing home resident death count somewhere around 13,000 to 16,000. Zucker’s overt contempt for the legislature, and the people who elected them, was evident when he excuse himself early because he claimed he had some more important engagement!

Deaths skyrocketed after Cuomo ordered on March 25 nursing homes to accept people with active cases of covid 19. Cuomo disregarded federal guidelines that said covid 19 patients should only be allowed in nursing homes IF they could be physically separated from other residents, IF there could be separate staffs, and IF the nursing home had adequate personal protective equipment. None of these guidelines were followed, and Cuomo prohibited the nursing homes from even testing residents to see if they have covid 19. In the aftermath, Cuomo blamed the deaths first on Howard Zucker, then nursing home employees, nursing home operators, nursing home visitors, the CDC, Trump, Republicans, and the media.

Nursing home issues are not usually with the scope of the Autism Action Network, but Cuomo used the same policy at groups homes and residential settings for people with disabilites. And if Cuomo set out to deliberatly injure the autism and vaccine-injured community during the last four years what would he have done differently?

Before you take action on these issues if you value the information and advocacy provided to you by the autism action network please make us possible for us to do so by supporting our one fundraising event of the year we do in conjunction with the Autism Community Walk, here: https://grouprev.com/autismcommunitywalk2020-AutismActionNetwork which is TENTATIVELY scheduled for Sunday, October 18 in Belmont Lake State Park in Babylon, NY. Cuomo willing.

Please click here Take Action to send a message to the decisionmakers asking what is the point to have hearings on covid 19 and nursing homes if the Governor continues to keep the number of deaths secret?

(If “Take Action” hyperlink doesn’t work, click on this link: https://cqrcengage.com/achamp/app/write-a-letter?6&engagementId=508922&ep=AAAAC2Flc0NpcGhlcjAxYnk7SKwemlDA_Z1jjRTso7yk4qjSvNINhc3P_H25i4quNlmwZx8oFxolfo9GAVr0147mY9xMbdK4AvD5bq9-jWQ_vNyxOptik6Iaz0ByU8M&lp=0)

Please get on the phone to the decisionmakers and ask them what is the point of another hearing on covid 19 and the nursing homes if we don’t know how may nursing home residents died in hospitals?

Start with your own State Senator and Assemblymember:

Find YOUR Assemblymember here – https://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/search/

Find YOUR Senator here – https://www.nysenate.gov/registration/nojs/form/start/find-my-senator

Then call all of the following influential Albany Lawmakers:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, (518) 474-8390

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, (518) 455-2584, (914) 423-4031

Speaker of the Assembly Carl Heastie, (518) 455-3791, (718) 654-6539

Senate Health Committee Chair Gustavo Rivera, (518) 455-3395, (718) 933-2825

Senate Aging Committee Chair Rachel May, (518) 455-2838, (315) 478-8745

Senate Investigations and Government Operations Committee Chair James Skoufis, (518) 455- 3290, (845) 567-1270

Assembly Health Committee Chair Richard Gottfried, (212) 807-7900, (518) 474-4941

Assembly Aging Committee Chair Harry Bronson, 518-455-4527, 585-244-5255

Assembly Investigations Oversight, Analysis and Investigations Committee, Chair John McDonald, (518) 455-4474.

The facts are clear. Governor Andrew Cuomo decided that he would place people with active cases of covid 19 into nursing homes even though, in his own words, he knew the disease would spread like, “fire through dry grass.” He prohibited nursing homes from testing residents to determine if they have covid 19 which made it impossible to following federal guidelines, that required keeping covid 19 patients physically separate, using separate staffs and using adequate personal protective equipment. Once the death count exploded, he gave the nursing homes retroactive liability protect form any lawsuits. Now he refuses to tell us how many of our family members died.

Governor Cuomo is a disaster for any family affected by the issues the Autism Action Network works to change.

He has cut developmental disability funding by more than half since he came into office.

Early intervention is falling apart in many parts of the state due to inadequate resources.

Special education resources are getting thinner and thinner due to exploding numbers of students with autism 9-13% growth from more than 20 years

There are ten-year waiting lists for group homes

Group home residents have no functioning legal protection from abuse or other criminal acts since Cuomo’s own invention, the “Justice Center” was declared unconstitutional 3 years ago.

He eliminated the religious exemption from vaccine mandates to attend school

Obtaining a medical exemption from a vaccine mandates is nearly impossible now without a lawsuit

And he had volunteered you and your children to be lab rats with whatever the covid 19 industry decides is in their best interest to impose on us. “Anything we can do to work with the federal government to get the vaccine done faster, we are all in,” Cuomo said on April 16. “We want to use New York as a laboratory. We are ready, willing and able.”

See the hearing hre: https://www.nysenate.gov/events or https://nyassembly.gov/av/live

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Cuomo Still Hiding Nursing Home Deaths

From John Gilmore, Autism Action Network

ACTION ALERT!

Cuomo still won’t release nursing home deaths, Covid 19 hearings announced

July 17, 2020 — Hearings on New York State’s response to the covid 19 epidemic were announced by the State Senate and Assembly. These hearings will be an indirect way to examine how Governor Andrew Cuomo has performed. He was given complete control over the response to covid 19 by the legislature on March 3.

The most important hearings, based on the estimated number of deaths resulting from policy decisions will be hearings on the nursing home fiasco scheduled for August 3 and 10, and on the subways on August 25.

Cuomo had been criticized for his decision, since rescinded, to force nursing homes to admit patients with active cases of covid 19, even though CDC safety guidelines could not be followed, and his Executive Order prohibited nursing homes from even testing residents for covid 19.

Cuomo still has not released information on how many people caught covid 19 in nursing homes but died in hospitals, and other locations, outside the nursing homes.

Before you take action on these issues if you value the information and advocacy provided to you by the autism action network please make us possible for us to do so by supporting our one fundraising event of the year we do in conjunction with the Autism Community Walk, here: https://grouprev.com/autismcommunitywalk2020 which is TENTATIVELY scheduled for Sunday, October 18 in Belmont Lake State Park in Babylon, NY.

Please click on this link Take Action to send messages to the Governor, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins, Speaker Carl Heastie, Assembly Health Chair Richard Gottfried, Senate Health Chair Gustavo Rivera, your State Senator and your Assemblymember asking them to release the number of people who died in nursing homes and who contracted covid 19 in a nursing home but died in a hospital or other location.

Here is the TAKE ACTION link (in case hyper-link doesn’t work) – https://cqrcengage.com/achamp/app/write-a-letter?7&engagementId=508693&ep=AAAAC2Flc0NpcGhlcjAxXowkdWon9S06mKof_xZhSDuXxhGRYIfntyRqM6mNKI9jC5pul-wE0cilvOCWtOBywk4UfULDe0qmg_n11GgHKgW1yNJ3BTXOAt__MW0NlTc&lp=0

IF for any reason the TAKE ACTION link doesn’t work for you, please find your State Reps at the following links:

Find YOUR Assemblymember here – https://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/search/

Find YOUR Senator here – https://www.nysenate.gov/registration/nojs/form/start/find-my-senator

Cuomo is also making it difficult to find the current number of nursing home deaths. That number is not released by the State. The raw data is though. It can be calculated by doing the following:

Find an online PDF document at the NYS Department of Health website at: https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/diseases/covid-19/fatalities_nursing_home_acf.pdf

Add up 252 numbers, which includes 4 separate numbers for each on New York’s for 63 counties in New York,
The current death total is 6482. BUT as it says on the NYSDOH document, “This data does not reflect COVID-19 confirmed or COVID-19 presumed positive deaths that occurred outside of the facility.”

The hearing on the Metropolitan Transit Authority (subways) is crucial as well. Cuomo, not NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, has ultimate control over the MTA subways. In March, the number of trains were substantially reduced, which resulted in the remaining trains being packed with riders. In April a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study said, “New York City’s multipronged subway system was a major disseminator – if not the principal transmission vehicle – of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic that became evident throughout the city during March 2020.”

The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City Jeffrey E. Harris http://web.mit.edu/jeffrey/harris/HarrisJE_WP2_COVID19_NYC_24-Apr-2020.pdf

Read the press release on the Assembly website (nyassembly.gov), here https://nyassembly.gov/Press/files/20200713.php

There is no mention of the hearings currently on the State Senate website (nysenate.gov.)

Here is the current schedule. Each of the hearings will be live-streamed on the State Senate and Assembly websites. (nyassembly.gov and nysenate.gov)

July 28 – How COVID-19 Has Impacted Higher Education: This hearing will examine how COVID-19 affected higher education institutions, students and faculty in the 2020 Spring semester and the impact it will have on the upcoming 2020-21 academic year.

August 3 & August 10 – Residential Health Care Facilities and COVID-19: These hearings will review New York State’s rate of infection and mortality due to COVID-19 in residential health care facilities.

August 11 – Elections in a Pandemic: A Review of the 2020 Primaries: This hearing will review the turnout and systemic voting issues in the 2020 primary elections and evaluate how well New York handled voting during a pandemic.

August 12 – Hospitals and COVID-19: This hearing will review New York State’s rate of infection and mortality due to COVID-19 in hospitals.

August 13 – Impact of COVID-19 on Workers: This hearing will explore the impacts of COVID-19 from a worker’s perspective, including unemployment insurance receipts, workplace safety standards and the impact of the federal Payroll Protection Program on maintaining employment.

August 14 – How COVID-19 Impacts New York’s Veteran Community: This hearing will examine how COVID-19 affected veterans.

August 25 – COVID-19 and the MTA: This hearing will evaluate the financial and operational impacts of COVID-19 on the MTA.

Each of the hearings will be livestreamed on the State Senate and Assembly websites. (nyassembly.gov and nysenate.gov)

NY Wants Permanent Mask Law

From John Gilmore

Autism Action Network

July 6, 2020 — New bills in the New York legislature seek to make permanent Governor Andrew Cuomo’s temporary Executive Orders allowing business owners to require employees and customers to wear face masks. The mask requirement began on March 7 with Cuomo’s Executive Order 202.17, and business were given explicit authority to refuse service to people without masks with Executive Order 202.34 issued on May 28. Executive Orders remain in effect for only thirty days and then must be renewed. Cuomo’s emergency power to rule by edict will expire next spring. But the proposed law has no end date. And it could be the beginning of a whole range of bills to make permanent other parts of the covid 19 Executive Order regime.

This bill is just another of the many bills passed and proposed since 2018 that steadily take away medical decision making away from individuals and parents of minors, and gives that power to politicians, bureaucrats, businesses, anyone but the person who will need to live with the consequences of the decision, and who will have to pay for it.

New York State Senator Todd Kaminsky (D-Long Beach) introduced Senate Bill S8559a, and Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal (D-Upper Westside) introduced the identical Assembly Bill A10694. (both are pictured above)

These bills are completely redundant. Current Executive Orders already achieve the purported goals of the proposed law. One would assume that when Cuomo believes the Executive Orders are no longer necessary, he will stop renewing them. These bills will simply saddle us with a new permanent silly law. One thing is clear, even by the logic of the Cuomo administration, it does nothing new to protect public health.

Please click on the link Take Action to send a message to your State Senator and Assemblymember as well as Kaminsky and Rosenthal, and the Governor, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins and Speak of the Assembly Carl Heastie, to express your opposition to this bill.\

And please get on the phone and call your State Senator and Assemblymember, as well as sponsors Kaminsky and Rosenthal while you are at it and let them know politely that you oppose this bill.

Here is the TAKE ACTION link – https://cqrcengage.com/achamp/app/write-a-letter?2&engagementId=508553&ep=AAAAC2Flc0NpcGhlcjAxVeZU2f9UYONQ-szT7OojezYcDBPmBnb5FuvniAowLMAs63rPrS_EKPMaOTh0MFRQq-khx7zkh9PuEpZXiwtJss-IiPh-EOM12EeBHkrV5z4&lp=0

IF for any reason the TAKE ACTION link doesn’t work for you, please find your State Reps at the following links:

Find YOUR Assemblymember here – https://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/search/

Find YOUR Senator here – https://www.nysenate.gov/registration/nojs/form/start/find-my-senator

And then call the sponsors of this bill and express your opposition to them:

State Senator Todd Kaminsky, (516) 766-8383, (518) 455-3401

Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal (212) 873-6368, (518) 455-5172

One of the worst tendencies of legislators is “Dosomethingism.” Problems arise and legislators want to be seen “doing something” about the problem. Frequently, they don’t much care what it is that they do, they care even less about the consequences doing something might have, they just don’t want to be caught not “doing something.” So they will pass any kind of stupid law as long as they can say they did something. This law seems like a good example of Dosomethingism.

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Protest Mandatory COVID Vaccine for ALL New Yorkers

Saturday, June 13th, Albany, NY

Your only option is to fight!

From John Gilmore

We know that forced COVID-19 shots are on the agenda of the drug industry and their allies in government and media. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has already volunteered the entire population of New York as guinea pigs for whatever product gets pushed out onto the market. And Cuomo has had dictatorial power since March 3 to do whatever he thinks is needed to deal with COVID-19.

(Don’t forget Senator Brad Hoylman is a big supporter of mandatory COVID-19 vaccines for adults – we need to Vote him out on June 23rd!)

You can’t run. You can’t hide. You can’t go to another state because this is everywhere. You can’t go to another country because the vaccine industry is global. Your only option is to fight. So join us in Albany on Saturday, June 13,^,the first anniversary of the repeal of the religious exemption in NY.

Bar Big Pharma

8:30 meet at 1 Elk Street in Albany, NY, HQ of the New York State Bar Association,

10:30, March to the Governors Mansion with a stop at the Capitol, and Merck’s Albany HQ at 150 State Street

11:30, Speeches and protest at the Governor’s Mansion, 138 Eagle Street, Albany, NY

Even dictators like to have the law on their side. Hitler made sure that every aspect of the Holocaust was legal according to Nazi law. Cuomo is no exception. On Saturday the New York State Bar Association will be voting to accept a report that argues forced COVID 19 shots are legal and constitutional. They want to give ultimate control of your body and your children’s bodies to the state and the politicians that run it.

Speakers:

Kevin Barry, Esq. First Freedoms

Rev. David Camp, Jr., Pastor of Agape Apostolic Church in Troy, New York

Cara Castronuovo, Golden Glove boxing Champion, Liberate New York

Mary Holland, Esq., General Counsel, Children’s Health Defense,

Jina Gentry, Constitutional Coalition

Sujata Gibson, Esq., NY Assembly candidate

John Gilmore, Autism Action Network

Brooke Jordan, Health Freedom Activist

Rev. Dr. Aaron Lewis, Pastor of Family Church, Hartford, Ct.

Sharen Medrano, advocate for parental choice and medical freedom

Jim Mermigis, Esq.

Rita Palma, New York Alliance for Vaccine Rights

Dr. Greg Wollen, DC

Bring signs, friends, family, noise makers, comfortable shoes and food and water to share.

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End the house arrest of disabled group home residents in NY

Petition to create respite facilities to support disabled adults ...

Restart day programs now

From John Gilmore

June 5, 2020 — After 10 years of Governor Andrew’s neglect of people with developmental disabilities it should come as no surprise that they are completely forgotten in his scheme to re-open New York. At the same time that Governor Cuomo is praising gatherings of tens of thousands of people in the streets, residents of group homes have been under house arrest since March 17 and family members have had no ability to visit, and currently re-opening plans include no mention of when this obscene policy hurting the disabled will be changed. All day programs were cancelled as well and remain shut down. If day camps and other group activities can resume so can programs for the developmentally disabled.

Please click Take Action to send and email to the Governor and your Assemblymember and State Senator telling them it is past time to end the house arrest of people who live in group homes.

And get on the phone.

Governor Andrew Cuomo: (518) 4764-8390

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Summer Camp is Open in NY but NOT for Disabled Kids

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

Is Cuomo opening day camps to bailout camp owner and Dem party chief Jay Jacobs?

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Programs for special needs children will remain closed.

From John Gilmore

June 3, 2020 — New York’s schools are still closed. There won’t be summer school. Special needs children are not receiving home services they are entitled to, or year-round programs required by federal law, but yesterday Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to allow day camps to open this summer. Why the inconsistency?

Could it be that Cuomo is helping out his close political ally Jay Jacobs, owner of three very expensive day camps on Long Island? Jacobs owns Timber Lake Camps which runs three day camps, North Shore Day Camp, Hampton Country Day Camp and South Hampton Day Camp. Jacobs is also the Chair of the New York State Democratic Committee, and the Chair of the Nassau County Democratic Committee, in short he is the head of Democratic Party in NY next to Cuomo.

Why don’t you ask them. If rich kids can go to day camp why can’t special needs children get the services and school programs they are entitled to?

Governor Andrew Cuomo, (518) 474-8390

Jay Jacobs, Timber Lake Camps (800) 828-CAMP

The NYS Democratic Committee does not have a phone currently being answered.

Or tweet the Governor at: @NYGovCuomo

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