Anonymous Letter Alleges Health Department Failings

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TRENTON – A four-page anonymous letter to state lawmakers alleged significant failures by the state health department in its handling of COVID-19 outbreaks at long-term care facilities.
The letter to Senate President Steve Sweeney and Senate Republican Leader Thomas Kean purports to come from members of the state’s Pandemic Response Team. The authors said they came together “to release the truth about the shortcomings of New Jersey’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.” Saying that they represent a “diversity of political views,” the letter’s writers identify their purpose as a wish “to blow the whistle on this tragedy.”
The letter alleges that there are “no established thresholds” guiding the reopening of the state’s economy. Speaking of the governor, the authors say “his own public health officials in the health department have no idea what inputs he is using to make opening decisions.”
Directly attacking the handling of long-term care facilities, the letter calls the state’s response an “unmitigated failure,” arguing that some in the health department advocated for “a more fair allocation of both PPE and test kits” for long-term care locations as early as late March, but the call went unheeded. They say they argued further for greater testing “for nursing homes as a general matter” to no avail.
Calling the amount of PPE supplies offered to the long-term care facilities by the state’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) “paltry,” the authors claim that a shortage of supplies placed constraints on effective testing strategies. They further state that OEM officials “shortchanged nursing homes and other congregate living centers,” where the “most vulnerable” New Jersey residents were, in terms of the coronavirus. The requirement that nursing homes take back patients from hospitals when they were not “tangibly ready” to do so led, the authors maintain, to “preventable deaths.”
Alleging a “toxic environment of infighting” within the Murphy administration concerning the pandemic, they claim their letter is a way of remaining “loyal to the mission.”
The letter concludes with a call for the resignation of Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli and further investigation into the state’s handling of the pandemic.
The governor has not commented on the letter specifically. His political opponents have not been as reticent. In a tweet, Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R-13th) called the letter “the most devastating indictment I’ve ever seen by employees of a sitting administration.”
Even before the letter made its appearance, Sen. Michael Testa (R-1st) called the state’s decision to put COVID-19 back into nursing homes “one of the most egregious and negligent decisions of our lifetime.”
At his Friday briefing, Murphy said he had little patience with leaks that have come from state departments concerning the COVID-19 response.
“People leaking things and giving the outside world some sense of how the sausage is made make dealing with the crisis more difficult,” Murphy said. “I’ve got no time for that, and that’s got to stop.”
Attorney General Gurbir Grewal launched an investigation into how the long-term care facilities handled the crisis.
“We understand that for many of these facilities, it was the equivalent of a 500-year flood, but that does not mean we shouldn’t examine how folks responded when those floodwaters started rising,” Grewal said, at a state briefing.
Public opinion polls show that most New Jersey residents approve of the job Murphy has done in combating the pandemic.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.