Healthcare

DOD On USNS Comfort Departing NY: ‘Expectations were far worse…than what we’ve seen’

Published

5 years ago

April 24, 2020

The US Navy Ship Comfort will be departing New York City after President Donald Trump deployed the ship at the request of Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio nearly three and a half weeks ago Jonathan Rath Hoffman, assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, told reporters Friday.

Moreover, although he didn’t provide exact numbers on the matter, Hoffman said that the “expectations were far worse… than what we’ve seen.” For that reason, Gov. Cuomo and Mayor DeBlasio are returning this ship to DOD’s Northern Command.

“If you look at a city like New York, the expectations were a far worse situation than what we’ve seen,” he said addressing questions of whether deploying Comfort was a waste of DOD resources. “Having our forces and having our people forward deploy with that capability and not needing it was far better than not having them there and needing it.”

The Defense Department, Hoffman said, will be consulting FEMA to pinpoint the vessel’s next deployment location and to expect a decision on the matter in the “coming days.”

“We expect the Comfort will be heading back to Norfolk, where it will go through kind of the normal post-deployment cycle, where we will restock it. It will be just prepared for the next deployment,” Hoffman said.

“We have said from the start… we wanted to be very careful with our deployment of those assets because we wanted to ensure that they are mobile, that they can be used somewhere else. So our goal all along has been to use them in New York as needed and then when the need no longer exists, to prepare them to move to the next location,” He added.

The ship holds over 1,000 medical care workers and has the capacity of 500 beds, which Hoffman indicated that the number of patients never hit that number, but that there were a “fair number” of patients cared for on the ship. As of last Friday, 71 of its 500 beds were occupied, CNBC reported.

There are currently 146,139 people infected with the coronavirus in New York and 10,746 have died from the virus statewide.

Click to comment

China

House Report Uncovers DOJ Secretly Investigated Nonprofit Accused of Channeling Taxpayer Funds to Wuhan Lab

Published

2 days ago

December 3, 2024

Sara Carter Staff

A bombshell House committee report released Monday, after a two year investigation, revealed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) secretly initiated a grand jury investigation into EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit accused of channeling taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab suspected of causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report, prepared by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, highlights concerns about EcoHealth’s grants, which allegedly funded gain-of-function research at the Chinese lab. Such research, aimed at enhancing viruses to study their potential risks, has been linked to theories suggesting the virus may have escaped from the lab. Efforts to access related records were reportedly obstructed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Internal emails and documents included in the report reveal that the grand jury issued subpoenas for genetic sequences and correspondence between EcoHealth Alliance’s president, Dr. Peter Daszak, and Dr. Shi Zhengli, a WIV scientist known as the “bat lady” for her work on coronaviruses. One email from EcoHealth’s legal counsel advised omitting references to the DOJ investigation when addressing congressional document requests, underscoring the probe’s secrecy.

The report also criticizes EcoHealth Alliance’s failure to comply with grant requirements. NIH funding facilitated a $4 million project on bat coronaviruses, $1.4 million of which was funneled to WIV. NIH deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak admitted the grant supported gain-of-function research, leading to highly infectious virus modifications.

The committee’s findings claim these experiments violated biosafety protocols, and Daszak failed to adequately oversee the research. Calls to bar Daszak and EcoHealth from future funding were reinforced by bipartisan agreement within the subcommittee.

The New York Post writes that the report also evaluated U.S. pandemic response measures, describing prolonged lockdowns as harmful to the economy and public health, especially for younger Americans. Mask mandates and social distancing policies were criticized as “arbitrary” and unsupported by conclusive scientific evidence. Public health officials’ inconsistent messaging, particularly from Dr. Anthony Fauci, contributed to public mistrust, according to the subcommittee.