On Thursday, Project Veritas released a shocking video in which New York City funeral home directors blew the whistle on artificially inflated coronavirus deaths. As PJ Media’s Megan Fox reported, Schafer Funeral Home Director Joseph Antioco told Project Veritas, “To me, all you’re doing is padding the statistics. You’re putting people on that have COVID-19 even if they didn’t have it. You’re making the death rate for New York City a lot higher than it should be.”
But why would they do this? Scientists are struggling to understand the virus, as medical professionals are struggling to fight it, and political leaders are struggling to manage the delicate balance between stopping the spread and reopening the economy. Artificially inflating the numbers of coronavirus deaths right now will have a large disruptive impact — scaring governments into delaying reopening and skewing the data for scientists and medical professionals.
So why?
A potential answer comes in the very same Project Veritas video.
Michael Lanza, funeral director at Colonial Funeral Home, suggested Mayor Bill de Blasio may have an economic incentive to let this happen.
“So I think, you know again this is my personal opinion, I think the mayor (Bill de Blasio) in our city (New York City), they’re looking for federal funding, the more they put COVID on the death certificate, the more they can ask for federal funds,” Lanza said.
If that’s true, Bill de Blasio is prioritizing New York receiving federal funds more than the actual fight against the coronavirus. If that’s true, he is meddling with the numbers that leaders use to decide whether or not to reopen the economy as millions of Americans are unemployed.
I sincerely hope it’s not true, but this motive would make sense.
If it isn’t true, de Blasio should issue new guidance insisting that death certificates do not list COVID-19 as the cause of death unless it was the true cause of death. It is vitally important that the numbers are right.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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