NY’s $64M COVID App Disgracefully Padded Consultant Pockets with Tax Dollars; NY’s Hochul Quietly Scraps $64M Excelsior COVID Vax App Due to $200K Monthly Costs and Fact No One Uses It Anymore, and other C-Virus related stories

By admin On Jul 9, 2023

NY’s $64M COVID app disgracefully padded consultant pockets with tax dollars:

Millions of New Yorkers recently woke up to a message on their phone — from an app they most likely forgot they ever even downloaded.

“Because demand for instant access to vaccine records has subsided, the NYS Wallet App will be discontinued on July 28, 2023,” the push notification read.

Just barely two years after its launch, the vaccine passport app — a relic of New York’s covid police state — was dead.

It could have been a cause for celebration for liberty-loving New Yorkers, had we not spent an eye-watering $64 million on the app. Instead, the grotesque government spending should make the blood of every taxpayer boil.

Back in May 2021, then Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the so-called Excelsior Pass — a Covid passport app — pitching it as a more convenient and effective alternative to carrying around a physical vaccine card to gain entry to venues, restaurants and gyms under New York City’s severe Covid restrictions.

The app, the governor said, represented “one step closer to reaching a new normal.” It was downloaded by 11.5 million New Yorkers — but its use case was never all that clear.

Why did we need a special app when we could just carry around the little white CDC vaccine card or just keep a photo of it on our phones?

There was a dystopian creepiness to scanning a QR code connected to a state database just to have a workout at the gym or grab a bite to eat at a restaurant. That is, if the notoriously glitchy app even worked in the first place. —>READ MORE HERE

NY’s Hochul quietly scraps $64M Excelsior COVID vax app due to $200K monthly costs and fact no one uses it anymore:

Gov. Kathy Hochul is quietly ending the state’s COVID vaccine digital passport after spending an eye-watering $64 million over two years on an app that is no longer used by New Yorkers and costs $200,000 a month to maintain.

The Excelsior Pass Plus and the NYS Wallet App, launched in May 2021 by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and stores proof of pandemic-era vaccinations for more than 11.5 million New Yorkers, will end on July 28.

The highly personal medical data will continue to be “private and secure,” say state officials.

Hochul, in a statement through her press office Monday, acknowledged the Excelsior App was a relic — and junked it.

“Because demand for instant access to vaccine records has subsided and the public health emergency has ended, the Excelsior Pass app will be discontinued,” said Hochul spokeswoman Maggie Halley.

The costs of the program exploded from $2.5 million to $17 million and then a sticker price of $64 million over two years in payments to consultants and contractors, according to a probe by the Times Union.

All consulting payments, including those made to Deloitte and the Boston Consulting Group, are now the subject of an investigation by state Inspector General Lucy Yang.