Democracy Has Prevailed.

January 20, 2023

Doug Mastriano Is Lying About Gov. Wolf And Covid. Again.

We're going wa-a-a-ay back to July of 2022.

This was well before St Sen Doug Mastriano lost the Pennsylvania Governor race by nearly 800,000 votes to the just inaugurated Josh Shapiro

On July 5 of 2022, Mark Levy, of the AP, published this:

Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor, has made a campaign staple out of the allegation that Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s policy of readmitting COVID-19 patients from hospitals to nursing homes caused thousands of deaths — a baseless claim for which no investigator or researcher has provided any evidence.

In fact, layers of inspections by researchers have pointed to entirely something different — nursing home employees ushering in the virus every day — while investigators found administrators flouting staffing requirements or infection-control procedures.

Further, no Pennsylvania nursing home has leveled any such claim like Mastriano’s, and a national nursing home trade association has agreed with the findings of researchers who say the spread of the virus in nursing homes directly correlated to community spread.

And this is what the researchers showed:

In the past two years, new research has piled up on how COVID-19 penetrated nursing homes.

The virus was largely introduced by asymptomatic workers in areas where the virus was heavily transmitted, researchers say. [Emphasis added.]

 And yet, this is what Doug published only yesterday:

On March 18, 2020, the Wolf administration issued the now famous directive to long-term care facilities to accept COVID-positive residents after release from hospitals. The ensuing fallout from the March 18 directive was predictable and tragic. This exposed our commonwealth’s most vulnerable residents to severe illness and death. By May, cases of the virus in nursing homes spread like wildfire. Roughly two-thirds of COVID deaths then were residents of long-term care facilities. In several counties, 100% of all COVID deaths at the time were in these very facilities.

So since the spread in nursing homes was traced back to the "asymptomatic workers" bringing the virus into the facilities - and not the returning patients - all of Doug's argument about Wolf's directive is, um, irrelevant, right?

And since it's been months since the AP article it's exceedingly fair to say that Doug is lying about COVID.

Still.