Republican House Ways and Means Committee member Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania believes he and four GOP colleagues aren’t getting copies of monthly nursing home data because state and federal officials have something to hide.
“I don’t know how many times you have to send letters and make requests for data and get no response at all,” Kelly told The Epoch Times in a March 31 interview. “Usually, when you ask a question and they don’t give you an answer, it’s because they don’t want to give you an answer.
“And the reason probably they don’t want to give you an answer is it may be harmful to them, but that doesn’t help us making decisions going forward.”
The FBI is now investigating whether Cuomo failed to report accurately how many nursing home deaths were attributable to the virus. Critics in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California have pointed to similarities to Cuomo’s approach among those states, all of which have Democratic governors.
“In Pennsylvania, and only because of Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo’s many problems, Gov. [Tom] Wolf’s gets overlooked. It’s the same policy, New York and Pennsylvania are almost identical in their policies,” Kelly said.
“The only problem is we can’t look at the data, we can’t get the data, and because of that, we have real concerns that something is going on that should not be going on.”
In a March 24, 2021, letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra, Kelly and four other GOP members of the Ways and Means panel requested copies of all the reports from the five states, which pursued similar policies regarding CCP virus patients and nursing homes.
“We continue to be concerned about policy decisions in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic regarding nursing homes and about whether certain states, including New York and Pennsylvania among others, may have intentionally misled the public and perhaps the federal government regarding COVID-19 related deaths in those facilities,” the signers told Becerra.
In addition to Kelly, the signers include Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the top Republican on the panel, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the ranking GOP member of the panel’s health subcommittee, and panel members Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.).
“You are likely aware of recent public reports about the state of New York’s effort to intentionally hide accurate data from the public and potentially from the federal government,” the four signers told Shapiro.
“Given that context and the missing Pennsylvania data, we are concerned that there may be a concerted effort in the state to conceal the true scope of COVID-19 related nursing home deaths. Perhaps something else explains the missing data, but we have yet to receive satisfactory answers for why the data remains missing.”
Levine was nominated as assistant HHS secretary by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate. During Levine’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asked her about the missing data.
Kelly told The Epoch Times, “When you don’t receive data that you’ve requested in a timely fashion, it’s no longer relevant. And if you don’t have any data moving forward to compare and looking backward as to what your policy should be and what changes should be made, it makes it impossible to develop policy, you just can’t do it.”
He said his “real question for Pennsylvania all along has been how long are you going to accept the fact, or maybe just not disclose the fact that you never had any data to begin with, but you chose to use a different way of delivering a message, not based on the data you had in your hand but the message you wanted to put out that you couldn’t back up with data.”
