The Comptroller of enabled corruption

 

NY Daily News 

A city contractor that agreed to cough up nearly $13 million to settle a federal false claims lawsuit in January has registered five contracts with the city comptroller’s office, public records show.

The Door, a non-profit that offers reproductive health care and other services to adolescents, had contracts worth more than $3.8 million registered with Comptroller Brad Lander’s office since Jan. 27, when it admitted to submitting inaccurate records to the state Health Department — raising questions about why Lander and Mayor Adams’ administration would approve of deals with an entity implicated in a “civil fraud action.”

“The vetting process is to weed out possible illegality and fraud,” said Michael Lambert, a former deputy comptroller for the city. “This just strikes me as unusual. It seems uncharacteristic of the way the process is supposed to work.”

Lambert said that The Door’s inaccurate reporting amounted to a “serious violation of the public trust,” which at the very least merits additional scrutiny from the comptroller and the Adams administration.

Instead, in its submissions to the state from August 2009 to November 2016, The Door counted the number of services rendered, rather than the number of visits — which is the appropriate measure under state guidelines, according to the settlement. The non-profit did that even after its then-chief financial officer told a Door data analyst in 2014 that the appropriate measure to submit was the number of visits to the facility, not the number of services provided.

In its complaint, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York’s Southern District alleged that The Door “knowingly” violated the federal False Claims Act by submitting false reports to the state.

In the settlement agreement, The Door acknowledged that its actions caused the indigent care pool “to pay funds to The Door to which it was not entitled.”

“The Door’s extraordinary cooperation is expressly acknowledged in the settlement agreements we signed with both the New York Attorney General’s Office and the United States Attorney’s Office,” said Door spokeswoman Mika De Roo. “Once the stipulations were issued, we immediately made full restitution in February 2022, without cutting or ending any of the critical services we provide to at-risk youth in New York City, and likewise made prompt, full, and appropriate disclosure of the matters settled to the city agencies that fund these services.”

The Door ultimately agreed to pay the federal government $2.7 million and the state government $10.2 million as part of the settlement.

THE CITY 

A top tree-trimming firm whose owners were charged last year with insurance fraud has been placed under the city Department of Investigation’s monitorship — a legal limbo so it can resume work pruning trees in the city’s two biggest boroughs as the case proceeds, officials said.

Brooklyn-based Dragonetti Brothers Landscaping is one of just a handful of private firms who work on trees maintained by the Parks Department, along with performing other city work. But last September, brothers Nicholas and Vito Dragonetti were indicted on accusations of evading more than $1 million in insurance premiums while repairing city roads and sidewalks, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. 

Since their arrests, however, public tree trimming in Brooklyn and Queens has been nonexistent, Brooklyn Paper reported last week, even as branch work in other boroughs is just being reinstated after COVID cuts.

“Routine block pruning in Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island is ongoing,” Crystal Howard, a spokeswoman for the Parks Department, told THE CITY in a statement this week. “We expect pruning in Queens and Brooklyn to resume this fall and to reach the annual goal of 65,000 street trees pruned in Fiscal 2023.”

The Parks Department only recognizes a few landscaping companies as qualified to do the work, so officials went back to the scandal-tarred Dragonetti Brothers — awarding them an $8.39 million contract in August for “emergency tree services in The Bronx and Manhattan,” according to the city comptroller. 

A more than $7 million contract for Queens tree pruning will kick in soon, while a more than $5 million contract for Brooklyn tree pruning is in the final review stages, the Parks Department told THE CITY.

Fake doctors have been making vaccination advisories at the Department of Health

How the left is losing me 

Toggling seamlessly between bikini and lab coat, Dr. Risa Hoshino’s Instagram persona embodied the millennial feminist: a pediatrician treating covid patients on the front lines who could still show off her body and build her profile as a lifestyle influencer. A vaccine advocate who collaborates with nationally renowned physicians, yet also finds time to talk about her favorite lipstick stain. A physician who manages to create science-education content for free in her downtime, then complains about being so underpaid and overworked that she asks her followers to contribute $5 each to her personal “coffee fund” (hundreds of her followers obliged).

After Dr. Hoshino unsurprisingly grew her Instagram to 113,000 followers in a year-and-a-half, Medical Marketing + Media  dubbed her one of “The top 12 physician influencers” on that platform.  Beckers HR called her a "top 10 physician influencer" and The Scientist lauded her as "a veteran of using social media to debunk scientific falsehoods.”

The only problem? She crafted her entire “covid health hero” persona on half-truths and exaggerations.

If you’ve been active on social media during the pandemic era, you may have noticed doctors and public health experts rising from obscurity and swiftly developing large followings.  Posting prolifically about masks, vaccines, and other covid-19 mitigation measures, these physicians and scientists flaunt their credentials including the prestigious institutions where they studied, establishing their credibility and, in turn, their respective brands as serious authoritative voices. A posed profile photo in a white lab coat (stethoscope optional) often helps add a final veneer of gravitas.

These doctors, who mark themselves with hashtags such as #medtwitter or #tweetiatrician, almost exclusively push a narrative emphasizing the dangers of Covid-19 infection, even among children who are statistically at very low risk.  At the same time, their social media posts minimize any potential harms or side effects from either non-pharmaceutical interventions – such school closures or masking toddlers –  or vaccines.  

A corporate media invested in promoting a government public health narrative plagued by inconsistent messaging, combined with an ever-growing reliance on smartphones and other devices, created a perfect environment for these social media medical personalities to thrive.

Enter the Instagram Doctor, MD:  Youthful, often conventionally attractive, always prepared to answer your questions. Their social media feeds burst with the concise messaging and advice laypeople craved throughout the pandemic, presented in simple terms with colorful infographics, catchy taglines, and viral hashtags.

Dr. Hoshino is a typical case. Hoshino had been building her brand since mid 2020, focusing primarily on Instagram until March 2022, when Twitter began aggressively promoting her tweets such as the one shown below.  She describes herself in her Twitter bio as a board-certified pediatrician in Public Health and “vaccine expert.” Her posts depict a stylish young physician, exhausted from heroic work treating covid patients on the front lines.

 

Say goodbye to Dr. Chok

  

 

 

Eyewitness News  

A walkout ceremony will be held Monday at the Department of Health in Long Island City for Health Commissioner Dr. David Chokshi.

Monday will be his final day on the job.

Dr. Chokshi has been leading New York City's response to the pandemic since August of 2020.

 
In an interview with Eyewitness News anchor Bill Ritter, the outgoing commissioner reflected on the toll the pandemic has taken on all of us.

"The stress and the grief and the trauma that everyone has gone through in their own ways so it's hard not to get emotional when you think about all those effects and the loss that so many people have experienced," Dr. Chokshi said.

In case anyone who "couldn't fully participate in society in NYC" and lost their job because of this asshole who implemented the vaccine mandate that stole their livelihoods and civil liberties, feel free to protest his "ceremony" at the DOH headquarters located at Queens Plaza. 42-09 28th St Long Island City.

de Blasio's pay to play and pandemic secrets and lies

 

THE CITY 

Mayor Bill de Blasio violated ethics rules twice by hitting up real estate industry players for donations to a nonprofit he created to boost pet projects, a city board found — but he got away with just warning letters.

City Hall released the two letters Wednesday from the Conflicts of Interest Board, dating from 2014 and 2018, after losing a protracted legal battle with The New York Times to shield the missives from public view.

It was a Department of Investigation report obtained by THE CITY in April 2019 that initially revealed the mayor had solicited funds from donors who had business pending with his administration.

The ethics letters concern the Campaign for One New York, a group that raised over $4 million between 2014 and 2016 to tout such initiatives as pre-K and affordable housing — and promote de Blasio himself as he sought to influence the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

The records reveal for the first time that the conflicts board cited de Blasio just six months into his administration, in July 2014, for violating ethics rules by personally soliciting $150,000 in donations from people or entities with business before the city.

Not even seven months after receiving the 2014 warning, he kept making similar fundraising calls — asking for donations from two additional developers and James Capalino, a lobbyist who had helped buoy his campaign for mayor, according to the 2018 warning letter.

Both violations occurred after the board had advised de Blasio’s campaign lawyer just after the mayor’s January 2014 inauguration that solicitations of that nature are prohibited by the city’s charter.

 The conflicts board noted in 2018 that the mayor also failed to provide a disclaimer to potential donors that their donations wouldn’t influence any city decisions.

“By soliciting these three donations from firms with business pending or about to be pending before executive agencies, and providing no disclaimers, you not only disregarded the Board’s repeated written advice, but created the very appearance of coercion and improper access to you and your staff that the Board’s advice sought to help you avoid,” the September 2018 letter says.

Despite the stern wording of the letter, it concludes that because the mayor’s nonprofit was disbanded in March 2016 — and because City Council passed legislation further regulating donations to city-affiliated nonprofits — that no discipline was warranted other than the warning.

THE CITY 

 As COVID-19 ravaged New York in March 2020, officials at the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene began plotting out where the virus was striking hardest across the five boroughs.

A map of fatalities, broken down by ZIP code, was ready to go online in the first week of April as New York neared the expected peak of deaths, according to people familiar with the matter and to emails reviewed by THE CITY.

“I think that the reality of this scenario is we need to be transparent to the highest level,” one top health department doctor wrote in an April 5, 2020, email, two days before coronavirus fatalities reached their apex.

But City Hall did not approve public release of neighborhood-level death data until May 18. New York City saw 12,923 confirmed and 3,399 probable deaths from the coronavirus between April 5 and May 18, 2020.

The emails provide a window into Mayor Bill de Blasio’s management of pandemic information in the harrowing early weeks of the COVID crisis — a glimpse revealed at a moment when his Department of Health once again demands the trust of New Yorkers as new variants, including Omicron, spread.

On Monday, the mayor announced a broad vaccine mandate for all private-sector employees — calling the move a “pre-emptive strike” against another possible wave of infections.

“We can talk about all the other tools and we will, but vaccination is the central weapon in this war against COVID,” he said.

“It’s the one thing that has worked every single time across the board on a strategic level. It’s the reason New York City is back in so many ways.”

Nearly 35,000 New Yorkers have died of COVID-19 since the first death was confirmed in early March 2020.

When New York faced its first COVID wave that spring, longtime city health department staffers believed it was vital to release information about where people were dying — even with caveats of imperfect data and a rapidly changing situation, according to people familiar with the matter and to the emails reviewed by THE CITY.

But information languished after being approved by the health department, which couldn’t publish anything without City Hall’s OK, those familiar with the matter said.

City Hall officials, though, blamed the delay in releasing the granular fatality data on a split within the health department, where, they said, some officials contended that ZIP code-level maps could create a stigma in hard-hit communities and a false sense of safety in other neighborhoods.

At that point, the virus was surging: Hundreds of New Yorkers a day were dying of COVID-19, with 815 people succumbing on April 7 — the deadliest day for the city during the pandemic’s so far 21-month toll.

Using borough-level fatality data then available, THE CITY had revealed on April 3, 2020, that Bronx residents were dying at a rate double that of the city, spurring calls for focused help and resources. When the city’s first fatality map was finally released on May 18, 2020, it showed that COVID largely slammed poor neighborhoods hardest.

Meanwhile, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, then the health commissioner, was battling behind the scenes with de Blasio over the city’s response to the unprecedented health crisis. De Blasio also clashed frequently with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Danielle Filson, a spokesperson for de Blasio, responded to THE CITY’s inquiries with a statement:

“City Hall swiftly delivered critical information to New Yorkers, and did so with accuracy and integrity,” she said. “We led the nation in our response to the pandemic — holding daily press conferences while setting up a testing and vaccine infrastructure that has kept New York City safe.”

Dave Chokshi's health department offices are COVID traps

 

NY Post 

 About 1,000 New York City Health Department employees have signed a letter blasting the agency’s return-to-office guidelines, accusing it of failing to communicate internal COVID-19 cases and not following a “science-informed” approach, including masking and social distancing.

“It’s a huge contradiction because we’re the Health Department,” one agency worker told The Post.

“We, of all agencies, are falling short of implementing an evidence-based and science-informed return-to-office process.”

“We’re not just whiny people who want to sit at home in sweatpants on our laptops,” a second DOH employee said.

“We are all so committed and dedicated to public health, and so hardworking. But we want scientific evidence explaining why it’s safe to go back to the office.”

Their eight-page Oct. 1 letter to DOH Commissioner Dave Chokshi says the agency’s Queens headquarters lacks onsite COVID-19 testing and sufficient supplies of hand soap and sanitizer.

“We’ve continuously found hand sanitizing stations empty on the 11th floor and a lack of hand soap available at 11th-floor kitchen sinks, despite having placed several service requests,” the fed-up public health workers wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Post.

 In addition, not all employees are adhering to mask rules — and instead of having supervisors enforce them, workers are asked to “police each other,” which creates uncomfortable situations, according to the letter.

The open cubicle setting at Long Island City headquarters also doesn’t allow for social distancing because desks are closer than six feet apart, a third DOH worker told The Post.

The letter requests agency officials “regularly provide information about our actual risks at the worksite, based on available evidence,” including the number of staff infected with COVID-19 and the “date of diagnosis at different DOHMH worksites.”

“Be transparent with actual details on airflow, expected transmission rate in our workplace settings, the rationale for removing the physical distancing requirement, and why it is considered safe to have us eat at our desks,” it says.

The exasperated agency workers also want to know why the commissioner didn’t question the mayor’s decision to force all 300,000 city workers back to their desks full-time starting Sept. 13 if it isn’t safe.

They note that Chokshi told them during an internal town hall meeting in August that productivity hadn’t suffered from remote work during the pandemic — despite the mayor saying that municipal workers don’t get as much done at home.

The Health Department has led the city’s response to the pandemic that’s sickened over 1 million New Yorkers and killed nearly 35,000 residents.

This exchange during a very overlooked zoom briefing about the Key to NYC revealed DOH officials flouting these guidelines.

 

Here's some more proof of @NYCHealthCommr's negligence and dereliction. During a #KeyToNYC zoom hearing, a citizen asked about the DOH officials flaunting of pandemic guidelines and the DOH rep suddenly bailed and the @NYCDoITT commish disregarded it and said it was irrelevant pic.twitter.com/yipNCVbOcX

— This is JQ LLC (@ImpunityCity) October 20, 2021

A student died of COVID-19 and Mayor Bill de Blasio, Chancellor Meisha Porter Dr. Dave Chokshi and Dr. Mitchell Katz will not reveal any information about what school the student's from, how the student got infected or when exactly the student died

 

 

 

Gothamist

Another New York City child has died of COVID-19, according to data posted this week by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The death raises the city’s reported toll among the youngest New Yorkers to 30.

Citing privacy concerns, the mayor and the health department wouldn’t confirm the child’s age, when they died and if they were exposed at school. But it’s the first COVID-19 fatality reported among minors (which covers ages 0 to 17 years) since public school students returned to classrooms on September 13th. The city’s last pediatric deaths were counted on August 2nd, when the health department raised the childhood figure from 26 deaths to 29.

Fewer COVID cases have been reported in children over the course of the pandemic, due in part to the lockdowns and the prioritization of adult patients. But infected children are way less likely to be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Thank god our youngest kids have been the least affected,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told the Brian Lehrer Show on Friday

Yet when pediatric hospitalizations happen, the kids can suffer routine complications such as respiratory failure and also stand a small chance of developing a later-stage condition known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) (or as it's commonly known as Long COVID - JQ LLC)

 “Thank god our youngest kids have been the least affected,” Mayor Bill de Blasio told the Brian Lehrer Show on Friday

 Admin note: apologies for the long headline, but names have to be named since the city refuses to do it.

de Blasio's DHS shuttled homeless people from hotels to shelters despite advisory from de Blasio's health department about resurgent pandemic

 

City Limits 

Back in May, as New York was on the precipice of reopening after more than a year of COVID-19 restrictions, the city submitted plans to the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) seeking permission to begin transferring around 9,000 homeless adults from hotel rooms back to the group shelters the city had used before the pandemic.

The rooms, rented by the city at the start of the crisis at some 60 hotels across the boroughs, were intended to help curb the spread of the virus by providing shelter residents with access to more private space instead of the often crowded, dormitory-style sites that make up the shelter system.

The effort worked—just 0.4 percent of the city’s total COVID-19 cases have been among New Yorkers experiencing homelessness, officials say—but their use was always intended to be temporary, Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly stressed.

In seeking the state’s permission to cease using the hotel sites, the city’s Department of Social Services (DSS) and Department of Homeless Services (DHS) submitted detailed plans to the state on how it would do so in order to minimize COVID risks, including meeting a series of specific criteria laid out by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

But a month later, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo lifted the state’s COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing guidelines in light of increasing vaccination rates, meaning the city no longer needed state permission to move forward on the hotel phase-outs. Those earlier required plans, a spokesperson for the former governor told City Limits at the time, were “moot.”

In the months since, the city has pushed forward on the controversial hotel transfers, despite legal challenges that temporarily halted the practice this summer. And the moves have been carried out without needing to meet the requirements the city set for itself in those May plans sent to the OTDA, since it was no longer required by the state to do so.

But those earlier draft plans, obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request by advocates from the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project and shared with City Limits, offer a look at the city Health Department’s initial recommendations for the moves, at odds with how the actual transfers have been carried out since.

The letter city agencies sent to OTDA on May 18 includes a list of Health Department “shelter reopening metrics,” and recommends that shelter populations should “remain in hotels until the criteria laid out in this document are met.” The criteria included, among other things, that the 7-day average hospital admission threshold for COVID-like illnesses remain below 50 cases per day, and that the city sees “no unforeseen changes in the COVID-19 disease landscape” such as “a major increase in COVID-19 variants of concern.”

The Health Department also recommended that the hotel-to-shelter relocations should be “discontinued (if not yet complete) or there should be a return to the use of hotels” if those factors are no longer met. The city’s average COVID-19 hospitalization admissions began to surpass that 50-case threshold beginning in July; it was 54 on Thursday, city data shows. Meanwhile, the highly contagious Delta variant now accounts for 98 percent of positive city COVID tests over the last four weeks, what advocates argue constitutes a major change in the city’s “COVID-19 landscape” that the DOHMH warned about in its draft recommendations.

Vaccine bussing bust

  

 Impunity City

This scene takes place in South Richmond Hill, Liberty Ave. and Lefferts Blvd.

 

 

Two massive vaccine buses giving out two vaccines, one for the two-dose Pfizer and the other for the one-shot Johnsons

Only one problem…

Nobody was doing it.

 

 

The Blaz is jukin' the COVID stats

 

Progress New York 

 The weekly Coronavirus sequencing data report released Wednesday showed the fifth, consecutive week of a drop in the number of Coronavirus specimen samples used for the sequencing of variants by the de Blasio administration. The sequencing data, for the week of May 10-16, reported that the trend in a highly contagious Coronavirus variant that has been deemed a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organisation has only increased by one tenth of one per cent. from the prior week. The B.1.617.2 variant has been reported to be roughly 50 per cent. more communicable than another variant prominent in the United Kingdom, and in some parts of England this variant is causing the majority of infections. Infections by variants, like B.1.617.2, have possible attributes that are “predicted to affect” vaccine escape, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet, the sequencing data released Wednesday showed almost no change in this particular Coronavirus substrain from the prior week week.

The collapse in the number of sample sizes raises questions about the Coronavirus variant trend data published by NYC Health, the Municipal Agency reporting the data.

For this report, Mayor Bill de Blasio (WFP-New York City) refused to admit that he was tampering with the sample sizes in order to distort the sequencing study findings. As Progress New York has reported, Mayor de Blasio has been solely focused on reopening the economy after the confinement orders issued beginning in March 2020 closed all nonessential business activity in New York City. An interview request made to the Mayor’s Office was never answered for this report.

 As reported by Progress New York, the sample size for the weekly Coronavirus sequencing reports has been falling since a peak of 1,831 samples were sequenced for the week of April 5-11. This week’s report showed that a mere 361 samples were sequenced, a fall to 19,7 per cent. of its April high.

Because the de Blasio administration has refused to explain the drop, it is not known how a sample size that is less than 20 per cent. of what it was five weeks ago remains random enough to be able to ethically make generalisations about trends in Coronavirus variants that are infecting the general population, particularly since confidence levels and the margins of error of studies influence sample sizes in statistical analyses.

The drop in the sample size is taking place as the number of individuals, who are getting tested for the Coronavirus, is also dropping. According to NYC Health Coronavirus testing data, the seven-day moving average of combined antigen and molecular testing for 23 May stood at 68,6 per cent. of the number of tests taken when compared with the similar metric for 11 April.

At Wednesday’s press conference, Dr. Dave A. Chokshi, the commissioner for NYC Health, and Dr. Jay Varma, the mayor’s senior advisor on public health, acknowledged the drop in the number of Coronavirus tests being administered and explained the drop in testing as working in an inverse relationship to the number of increased Coronavirus vaccinations being given.

Placing so much emphasis on testing of the unvaccinated ignores asymptomatic vaccine escape infections, as well as the known concern with waning vaccine immunity that may require boosters, the latter an issue yet to be addressed by U.S. Government health ministers. Since Coronavirus testing appears to now be focused on the unvaccinated, that also can skew the randomness of weekly sequencing report data.

City Health Department is wasting doses and vac sites are fugazi

Lincoln HS in Coney Island this morning. Mostly staff and almost no one getting vaccinated. Irony is the city’s website says no appointments are available for my constituents today, but no one is there & they’re sitting on vaccine supply. This is unacceptable @nycHealthy ! pic.twitter.com/6jXOnyndSs

— Mark Treyger (@MarkTreyger718) January 30, 2021

 

 

 NY Post

 The city’s 15 vaccination hubs were ghost towns last Saturday, and the city Department of Health is refusing to reveal just how bad distribution went.

One DOH staffer stationed at the Hillcrest High School hub in Queens on Jan. 30 said he did nothing all day.

“You cannot imagine how much nothing it was,” he said of the demoralizing day.

He said there were about 70 workers on hand — some earning overtime pay for 12-hour shifts — and about 10 people to vaccinate.

The worker said several appeals were made to DOH officials to be able to vaccinate people without appointments, and they were denied. He said the hubs had about 400 to 700 doses.

“We could have used that day to vaccinate thousands of people … and we just blew it,” he said

 NY Post

As desperate New Yorkers scramble to get the COVID-19 vaccine, one Brooklyn clinic stood largely devoid of recipients Saturday morning.

A video of the vaccination hub at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island showed plenty of gowned workers ready to jab arms and few, if any, patients.

“This is crazy. This is nuts. This is insane,” a woman can be heard saying in the video as the camera pans empty vaccination stations. It was tweeted by Councilman Mark Treyger, who said it came from a worker at the site.

A furious Treyger, who represents Coney Island, called the situation “unacceptable.”

“There is no excuse for what happened today,” he said.

The city Department of Health blamed the problem on its website not being updated “to show that there is availability,” Treyger said.