A new undercover video released by Project Veritas features numerous funeral home directors expressing doubt over the official number of deaths attributed to COVID-19.
“To me, all you’re doing is you’re padding the statistics. You know, you’re putting people on that have COVID-19 and if they didn’t have it, you’re making the death rate for New York City a lot higher than it should be,” said Joseph Antioco, director of the Schaeffer Funeral Home in Brooklyn, New York.
All of the funeral home directors featured in the video are from New York City, which is considered the epicenter of America’s coronavirus pandemic.
“To be honest with you, all of the death certificates, they’re writing COVID on all the death certificates, whether they had a positive test or whether they didn’t” said Michael Lanza, director of Staten Island’s Colonial Funeral Home.
“So I think, you know, again this is my personal opinion, I think like the mayor in our city, they’re looking for federal funding and the more they put COVID on the death certificate, the more they can ask for federal funds. So I think it’s political,” he added.
Josephine DiMiceli, president of the DiMiceli and Sons funeral home, said the sister of a deceased client “refused to believe that her sister had COVID-19.”
“Right away they put down COVID-19 on her death certificate,” she said. “They did an independent autopsy, bingo – no COVID-19.”
Antioco claimed that medical examiners are “automatically putting down on the death certificate COVID-19,” unless the patient was under the care of a private doctor.
“Two weeks ago, I had a 40-year-old man that died in his house, okay? They didn’t even go to the house, the guy had no underlying causes, no medical conditions. They released him from the house without even going, saying he had COVID-19 because he had a fever,” he said. “But now, how do you know that’s what he had? You don’t. But now the death certificate shows that he had COVID-19.”
Minnesota Sen. Scott Jensen (R-Chaska), a practicing physician, faced backlash earlier this month when he claimed that doctors can place COVID-19 on death certificates without confirmed test results.
Jensen said a guidance issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) implies that it “would be appropriate to diagnosis on the death certificate COVID-19” if a patient exhibited symptoms but never actually tested positive.
Minnesota Department of Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm pushed back on Jensen’s claims and said he was spreading “misinformation.”
“When deaths are registered as suspected or probable COVID-19, we don’t just leave it at that. The MDH Office of Vital Records staff follows up on these death records. Staff contact the medical certifiers to ask them if testing came back to confirm COVID-19,” Malcolm said during a press briefing.
“When it has, the medical certifier updates the cause of death statement that they previously registered or provided. There might be records that stay as suspected or probable if the cause of death statement was written but testing was never ordered or the record doesn’t get updated by the health care provider,” she continued.
As of Thursday, New York City had 162,212 cases of COVID-19 and 12,572 deaths.
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Photo “Michael Lanza Interview” by Project Veritas.
Neil McCabe, The Tennessee Star and Star News Network National Correspondent, also serves as a contract communications manager for Project Veritas
