One indication of whether a policy is driven by principle or just politics, prejudice, and/or passion is if it actually relates to the problem it purports to solve. Given this, it could raise eyebrows that while New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio has threatened to “permanently” shut down churches that dare hold worship services during the Wuhan virus pandemic, his municipality’s subway cars are dirtier than ever and are “transporting” the disease, as one MTA conductor put it.
Aside from the filth, a major problem is that the city’s subways have become de facto vagrant shelters, with derelicts living in close quarters crammed into the reduced number of train cars (service has been cut by 75 percent) and perhaps becoming disease vectors.
Making it worse is that while ridership is down to five percent of normal, this comprises “essential” workers such hospital and grocery-store employees — the very people de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo claim to appreciate so much.
CBS2 in New York reports on the story, writing that cellphone video “shows subway cars lined with people passed out, using shoes as pillows, not wearing masks, with trash piled in shopping carts.”
“‘There is an astronomical amount of homeless people now in the subway,’ MTA train conductor Tramell Thompson said,” the site continues. “The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is now the Metropolitan Transmission Authority. They are transporting this virus.”
As mentioned earlier, reducing the cars’ numbers has exacerbated the problem, as an anonymous conductor told CBS2.
“Because we have less trains to work with, the homeless in the system congregate on fewer trains, so it’s way more evident now than it’s ever been,” the site quotes the conductor as saying. “It’s causing a hazard to MTA employees and the people that we have to transport during this time.”
In fact, CBS2 reports that 50 transit workers have died from the Wuhan flu. (Note, however, that since authorities are encouraged to classify anyone who dies with the virus in his system as a Wuhan flu death — even if he was asymptomatic with regard to the virus and actually died of another cause — such numbers can’t be taken at face value.)
Moreover, while the MTA claims that all its subway cars and buses are sanitized every 72 hours, the conductors dispute this.
“‘The trash, the feces, the urine, is there. It’s just a very toxic, unsafe environment,’ Thompson said,” CBS2 further reports.
“‘We’ll get a call from someone on the train. They’ll press the passenger intercom and one of them is urinating in the cars,’ the anonymous conductor said. ‘And because we have so few trains, we have to ride back and forth.’”
CBS2 also relates that when asked, Mayor de Blasio just passed the buck, essentially blaming the situation on an underling. For sure, he certainly lacked the passion and resoluteness he showed late last month when threatening to shut down churches and other worship houses permanently if they violated his ban on gatherings of more than 10 people.
So one could wonder: Would Bolshevik Bill be spurred to action if, instead of being united in their public vomiting, urination, defecation, and substance abuse, the vagrants joined together in reciting the Lord’s Prayer?
Then again, his response certainly might be different if the transients prayed the Muslim’s Shahada, as the tweet below indicates.
As Muslim New Yorkers prepare to start the holy month of Ramadan tonight, Mayor Bill de Blasio says the city is taking steps to support the Muslim community with Halal food programs.
“Over half a million meals will be distributed during Ramadan” for Muslim New Yorkers in need pic.twitter.com/d4PbFtGMa5
— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 23, 2020
“‘One of Ramadan’s most noble callings is to feed the hungry,’ de Blasio said Thursday,” reports the Blaze. (This might come as a surprise to the poor Pakistani Christians and Hindus currently being denied food by Muslims, who in this case “reportedly claimed that religious minorities were excluded from aid under Sharia law,” BosNewsLife tells us.)
As for the vagrants, The New American was one of the first outlets to report on the threat allowing rampant homelessness poses during this, or any, pandemic. In fact, while we know that the elderly and medically compromised are vulnerable to the Wuhan flu, a basic question remains unanswered: What percentage of the virus deaths are accounted for by vagrants, whose unhealthful, high-risk lifestyles weaken them?
Knowing this might lend perspective — but it also might indict the big-government Democrats who’ve facilitated vagrancy via policy.
Furthermore, the vagrants also serve as a “Petri dish” in which the virus is likely to “mutate” (which could render a vaccine ineffective), as radio host and trained epidemiologist Michael Savage pointed out last month.
Of course, de Blasio isn’t the only left-wing politician who preaches about Wuhan flu responsibility while practicing the contrary. While his governor, Andrew Cuomo, keeps the Empire State “locked down”; releases vicious thugs from prison so they can commit crimes and possibly spread illness in the wider society; and gives haughty, holier-than-thou, ill-informed lectures to those he rendered unemployed, telling them to become “essential”; his state health department has also forced nursing homes to accept Wuhan virus-positive patients.
That’s right: The man who issued the executive order “Matilda’s Law” (named after Cuomo’s nonagenarian mother), which places restrictions on people over 70 and those interacting with them — enforced via fines of up to $5,000 — has seeded elder-care homes with the virus.
Moreover and quite unbelievably, the first Wuhan virus patients admitted to a Queens nursing home under Cuomo’s state rules “arrived along with some grim accessories — a supply of body bags,” the New York Post reports.
Note that unlike the general population, whose Wuhan flu mortality rate has been exaggerated and may end up being similar to that of the flu, the vulnerable elderly’s death rate may be 80 times as high.
And, sadly but not surprisingly, 30 residents have now died at that Queens nursing home (the virus was previously absent there). But the city is remaining vigilant: Its officials are sending the home “five body bags a week — every week,” the Post also informs.
This left an executive at the facility with some choice words for his governor. “Cuomo has blood on his hands,” the paper quotes him as saying. “He really does.”
Meanwhile, as these statist politicians cite health concerns while trampling civil rights; shutting down the economy; destroying wealth, thus causing poverty related health problems and increased mortality; and threatening our Republic’s long-term survivability with their worse-than-the-disease “cure”; they’re also ignoring a study indicating that the lockdowns don’t save lives.
But it’s good to know they really care — about what, is the question.
Image: Boogich/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
