Nashville Mayor, Health Department Covered Up Real COVID-19 Data

City officials in Nashville are under fire after a thread of emails were released by Fox 17 News on Thursday demonstrating that Mayor John Cooper and Metro Health Department hid the COVID-19 contact tracing results for bars and restaurants from the public.

In June, the city began a contact tracing initiative for certain “coronavirus clusters.” While the tracing results showed that more than a thousand cases of COVID-19 were discovered to be highly transmissible for people on construction sites and in nursing homes, bars and restaurants combined only had 22 cases.

According to emails obtained by the local news station, the mayor’s senior advisor and a health department employee, however, decided not to release the information.

“This isn’t going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor’s Office?” health department employee Leslie Waller asked.

“Correct, not for public consumption,” senior advisor Benjamin Eagles replied.

When asked about the low numbers produced from supposed transmission in bars and restaurants by a reporter, health department official Brian Todd didn’t know how to respond and asked other officials for assistance.

“Please advise how you recommend I respond,” he wrote.

A reply from an unidentified source on the email chain clearly stated that the department did not “want to say a specific number” because the numbers were “low.”

“My two cents. We have certainly refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are low per site,” the email read.

“We could still release the total though, and then a response to the over 80 could be because that number is increasing all the time and we don’t want to say a specific number,” it continued.

 

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STORY 🚨 “COVID-19 emails between the mayor’s senior advisor and the health department reveal only a partial picture. But what they reveal is disturbing.” Link for investigation from @dferrier60 in bio.

A post shared by FOX NASHVILLE (@foxnashville) on Sep 17, 2020 at 6:19am PDT

Cooper closed bars and restaurants earlier in the year due to rising COVID-19 concerns.

While neither the mayor’s office nor the Metro Health Department responded to the allegations, a Metro staff attorney verified the emails at the request of a local councilmember Steve Glover.

“I was able to get verification from the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Health that these emails are real,” the staff attorney said.

According to Glover, the emails and lack of response by the mayor’s office and health department indicate deception.

“We raised taxes 34 percent and put hundreds, literally thousands of people out of work that are now worried about losing their homes, their apartments…and we did it on bogus data. That should be illegal,” Glover said.

“They are fabricating information,” Glover added. “They’ve blown there entire credibility…It’s gone. I don’t trust a thing they say going forward …nothing.”

Instead of responding to a comment request on the issue to Fox 17, the news outlet reports that it was “told to file a freedom of information act request” to confirm and verify the emails.

When an investigative reporter at Fox 17 News pressed the mayor’s office for comment on the issue at a press conference on Thursday, Cooper’s spokesman Chris Song accused the station of having a “lapse in journalistic judgment” by not following up again.

“When you asked for comment, there was absolutely no context for the comment that you requested,” Song said.

“We’re asking you now,” the reporter replied. “We asked you before, we’re asking you afterwards. It’s so funny that a metro staff attorney validated these emails in one hour that you told us to FOIA.”

via thefederalist