27 November 2022: Whistleblower Speaks About NJ's COVID Nursing Home Deaths for Veterans

Exclusive: Exec who blew the whistle on NJ COVID deaths at vets home says key flaws remain

Welcome back from the Thanksgiving holiday! We're picking things up with this in-depth story about the whistleblower who reported the COVID deaths taking place at nursing homes for veterans operated by the New Jersey state government. Here's the introduction, which communicates the urgency that existed back in early 2020:

As COVID raced through the state-run veterans home in Paramus at the start of the pandemic in 2020, an administrator watched with growing alarm as residents died, staff members fell sick and the facility ran short of masks, gloves, gowns and tests. Panic spread as quickly as the virus itself.

When the death toll climbed to six or seven a day at an institution that typically saw three or four resident deaths a week, that administrator became the whistleblower who called himself “vetkeeper.”

On April 8, 2020, using his pseudonym and an encrypted email service based in Switzerland, he contacted NorthJersey.com to report what he was seeing.

“Nearly 40 resident deaths since March 25,” he wrote. “Ten more residents positive, 47 waiting test results ... The public needs to know. I am on the inside. I will keep you posted.”

The first story of the deaths at the New Jersey Memorial Veterans Home at Paramus, based on information from “vetkeeper” and other sources, broke that evening. “Vetkeeper” arrived at work the next morning to find two news trucks out front, a helicopter overhead and the National Guard on the way.

But in many respects, it was too late. Nearly a third of the residents at the Paramus veterans home would die of COVID or presumed COVID. In all, more than 200 residents died at New Jersey’s two hardest-hit veterans homes — 86 from confirmed COVID in Paramus and 72 in Menlo Park, with another 47 at the two homes presumed to have died from COVID.

That's old news, here's the new news, as the whistleblower has now disclosed their identity:

Now “vetkeeper” has decided to reveal his identity and say more about the veterans home. He is Dave Ofshinsky, former business manager and, for a brief period, assistant CEO for non-clinical affairs at the Paramus home, where he worked for 5½ years.

He says he is doing so out of frustration at what has not happened since that initial COVID crisis.

“Nothing has happened from the administration [of Gov. Phil Murphy] on this,” Ofshinsky said in a recent interview at his home. “When it was happening, the governor said there was going to be a ‘post-mortem. We’ll get to the bottom of this.’”

A recent scathing inspection report on the state veterans home at Menlo Park, a sister institution, only strengthened his views. It cited the home for having COVID infection control lapses that jeopardized the health and safety of all its residents and staff, as well as abuse of a resident. This week, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, threatened to effectively shut down the home saying they would stop paying for new admissions beginning Nov. 22, and stop all payments by March 8 unless "substantial compliance is achieved."

“All that’s happened has been the payouts to families,” Ofshinsky said, referring to $69 million in state funds to 190 families of dead or sickened veterans to quietly settle their legal claims.

Payouts to settle legal claims might bring a sense of closure to some, Ofshinsky said, but “I myself never had a sense of closure that the state has done the right thing to prevent something like this ever happening again.”

Ofshinsky is well justified in his view, because New Jersey's state government has not acted to correct the well documented problems at the nursing homes it ran. In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice has made no visible progress in its criminal investigation of what happened in New Jersey's nursing homes for months.

There's quite a lot more to the story, so we'll recommend clicking through to the story to get all the details.