How NY Dems Used the COVID Crisis to Waste YOUR Money; NYC Health Department was Charged Up to $2.4K per COVID Vax at Some Locations Due to Poor Oversight: Audit, and other C-Virus related stories

By admin On Jul 17, 2023

How NY Dems used the COVID crisis to waste YOUR money:

New York Dems have their own ugly take on Rahm Emanuel’s infamous dictum “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”: They seize on crises to get away with waste.

For proof, look no further than their outrageous COVID boondoggles.

First up? A damning new audit from the City Comptroller’s office reveals that, under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, a medical staffing and services company won a contract allowing it to take taxpayers to the cleaners as it overstaffed vaccination sites and overcharged for the shots themselves.

Executive Medical Services charged as much as $2,423 for some jabs — and an insane $937 for some COVID tests.

That’s because the city’s $390 million deal with the firm was set up to encourage precisely this behavior.

That’s more than poor oversight. It’s a blatant invitation to grab as much cash as possible before the gravy train leaves the station.

But it lines up 100% with what was going on at the state level.

Such as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s much-hyped Excelsior Pass vaccine-tracking app, part of his Orwellian social-control measures in response to the pandemic.

Besides recalling the worst excesses of authoritarian China, the app — which was pointless from the start, as most New Yorkers simply used phone-taken snaps of their vax cards for proof of vaccination — cost taxpayers $64 million over the last two years, far beyond the Cuomo administration’s initial (clearly fake) estimate of $2.5 million. —>READ MORE HERE

NYC Health Department was charged up to $2.4K per COVID vax at some locations due to poor oversight: audit:

Poor oversight by New York City’s Health Department allowed an outside vendor to dramatically overstaff vaccination and testing sites during the COVID crisis, leading to a multi-million dollar cash grab, a new audit by the City Comptroller reveals.

The investigation revealed that the company, Executive Medical Services PC, was allowed to set its own staffing levels for its sites and then billed DOH based on a formula that included staffing levels, removing key oversight and cost controls.

That meant that the all-in costs for each test administered by EMS fluctuated wildly from an average of $202 to $937 per site, based entirely upon how busy the staff was.

There was an even bigger spread in costs for vaccination, where the average cost per shot ranged from $169 to $2,423 depending on the site and how busy it was.

“While the audit recognizes that DOHMH was responding to an unprecedented pandemic situation, effective cost-management was not incompatible with DOHMH’s overarching mission, and indeed, is an essential part of emergency preparedness,” wrote the comptroller, Brad Lander, in a letter.

The Health Department inked the contract with EMS during some of the darkest days of the COVID outbreak in May 2020, ultimately paying the company $390 million for the three years of services the company had provided as of March 2023.