Project Veritas: NYC Funeral Home Directors Claim COVID-19 Deaths Inflated
IMAGE CREDITS: KZENON / GETTY IMAGES.
Deaths in New York City are being falsely attributed to the coronavirus, funeral parlor workers recently told Project Veritas.
In a new undercover investigation, Project Veritas spoke to funeral home directors throughout the five boroughs who said the COVID-19 death toll is being artificially inflated.
“To be honest with you, all of the death certificates are writing COVID on it, they’re writing COVID on all the death certificates,” the director of the Colonial Funeral Home on Staten Island, Michael Lanza, told an undercover Veritas journalist in late April.
Lanza went on to speculate Mayor Bill de Blasio could be inflating the death counts to receive more federal funding.
“Whether they had a positive test or didn’t, so I think again this is my personal opinion, I think like the mayor and our city–they’re looking for federal funding and the more they put COVID on the death certificate the more they can ask from the federal funds.”
The funeral director also hypothesized there was political motivation behind falsely labeling COVID deaths.
“I think it’s political, so, I’m going to turn around and say: ‘You know, like, not everybody that we have here that has COVID on the death certificate died of COVID.’ Can I prove that? No, but that is my suspicion,” Lanza said.
Another funeral home director discussed an incident that involved a woman who was so adamant her sister died of Alzheimer’s and not COVID that she ordered an autopsy. She discovered her sister in fact did not have COVID as originally reported.
“The sister refused to believe that her sister had COVID-19 and like I said, she was the one that said to me she says well my cousin is you know, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,” said DiMiceli & Sons funeral home president Josephine DiMiceli. “We’re gonna get an autopsy,’ and I said do what you gotta do, you know and she did what she had to do and sure enough I called her and I said to her that the doctor signed the death certificate did the autopsy – no COVID-19.”
In another interview, a funeral director in Brooklyn claimed the city was “padding the numbers” of COVID deaths merely because it was convenient.
“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,” Daniel J. Schaefer Funeral Home director Joseph Antioco told Veritas.
“But now, how do you know that’s what he had? You don’t. But, now the death certificate showed shows that he had COVID-19.”
“If you don’t have a private doctor and you weren’t under any medical care, they’re automatically putting down on the death certificate COVID-19, because they don’t wanna go–they’re so overwhelmed,” the man told reporters, adding, “They’re putting everything as COVID-19, so they’re padding the numbers.”
“They’re not going out to houses anymore,” Antioco continued, saying normally “They would go out to the house, they would investigate the scene, they would do some testing at the scene and then come up with a conclusion as to: ‘He had heart disease.’”
Antioco wonders whether the deaths are inflated simply because a medical examiner didn’t want to go out and conduct testing on deceased individuals.
“How many of them are actually COVID-19? Or is the M.E.(Medical Examiner) just putting that because they don’t want to go to the scene?”
Veritas says more undercover reports concerning questions surrounding the coronavirus are forthcoming.