3 April 2022: Will NJ Governor Murphy Ever Live Up to His Pledge to Prove "Full Accounting" for COVID Nursing Home Deaths?

Two years since veterans home Covid disaster, Murphy's promise of 'full accounting' has gone nowhere

This report was originally published on 28 March 2022. It documents the continuing stonewalling of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy's administration to release documents related to COVID nursing home deaths in New Jersey's nursing homes and veterans homes. Here's an excerpt:

Despite repeated promises to conduct an independent investigation and develop a "full accounting" of his administration's handling of the pandemic — and in particular what happened in the veterans homes — Gov. Phil Murphy has not provided any substantive explanation for why so many men and women died in the three nursing homes his administration operates.

In fact, his administration has fought against the release of key veterans home documents for more than a year.

NorthJersey.com sued the Murphy administration last year after it denied a public records request for emails between top officials at the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs over management at the homes during the first wave of the pandemic in the spring of 2020.

After months of legal wrangling and court hearings, the administration turned over 147 pages of documents. Almost all of them were completely redacted.

It was the second time in a year that the Murphy administration blacked out documents NorthJersey.com had sought regarding the veterans homes. The first came in December 2020, when the administration redacted a key email that tied Murphy's office to a controversial policy to discipline nurses and aides who used the Menlo Park home's supply of protective masks without permission.

"Overall, when it comes to anything relating to COVID or other public health issues, the Murphy administration has been super tight-lipped," said CJ Griffin, a Hackensack attorney who focuses on public records access and represented NorthJersey.com in its lawsuit. "I have had to write many objection letters and to sue multiple times on behalf of various requestors just to get some basic transparency.

Needless to say, that's not the kind of proactive compliance that would confirm the Murphy administration isn't trying to hide damaging information about its version of New York's Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive. Along with New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, New Jersey was one of just four states to force nursing homes to admit COVID patients being dumped out of hospitals to free up their bed space during the most dangerous phase of the coronavirus pandemic.

There's quite a lot more information in the article, which provides a good overview of some of the worse abuses that took place at New Jersey's nursing and veterans homes during hte pandemic. That anybody knows about at this writing, in any case.