Monday, January 10, 2022

10 January 2022: Lawmaker Wants to Sideline New Jersey Legislature's COVID Nursing Home Deaths Probe

Legislature should stand down on nursing home probes, top lawmaker says

The editors of the Star-Ledger interview New Jersey State Senator Joseph Vitale (D-Middlesex), who indicates he wants to sideline the state legislature's probes into COVID nursing home deaths until after the Biden administration DOJ and the state attorney general have completed their own investigations.

New Jersey recently paid $53 million to the 119 families whose loved ones died at the state-run veterans homes at Menlo Park and Paramus, but many would say that this gesture is not the closure we all need to understand the Covid catastrophe that terrorized these facilities and took 8,799 lives in all nursing homes across the state.

So how do we get to the unvarnished truth? Republicans in the state Legislature have requested a special committee with subpoena power to get to all the answers, a proposal that has been rejected by the Democratic majority. And the one Democrat who has led the call for lawmakers to investigate mismanagement at these facilities has come to believe that such an inquiry would be superfluous.

Sen. Joseph Vitale, the chairman of the Health Committee, thinks the active investigations of nursing homes by the Department of Justice and the state Attorney General will be more effective than any inquiry a special panel can conduct, and that the Legislature should confront the problem more directly.

In the following Q&A excerpt, Vitale acknowledges he will not get straight answers from state officials, which is his main argument for why the legislature should sideline any probe of its own.

Q. You’ve concluded that the Legislature should step aside from any nursing home investigations at this time. Doesn’t that create the suspicion that some want to paper-over this tragedy and move on?

A. That’s an unfounded concern. The DOJ and the AG’s office are conducting separate investigations, and doing a deep dive into veterans homes, nursing homes, and Andover in Sussex County, which had horrific tragedies. No one– no entity, no witness – will screw around with the U.S. Department of Justice.

On the other hand, I can chair a committee, ask a million questions, and get no answers. The DOJ has the resources, attorneys, investigators and the access and authority to get it done better than anyone. The Legislature doesn’t have the same bandwidth, so we’ll wait to see what they reveal, and then we’ll have hearings after that to discuss the results and reforms that we haven’t already put in place.

We'll recommend clicking through the link to the full interview portion of the report. We'll also note that NJ Governor Phil Murphy's copycat version of Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive is not mentioned.

Here is related information from the timeline:

There is no information at this date on the status of the U.S. Department of Justice's investigation of what happened in New Jersey's state government-operated nursing homes for veterans.

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