Nashville's Democrat mayor is in hot water after emails from his office leaked online.
The emails appear to suggest that the mayor's office colluded with metro health to purposefully hide actual COVID numbers from the public.
Why?
Because the numbers were too low!
The numbers suggest that there is no need for the lockdown to go any longer.
Democrat mayors have been issuing strict lock down orders to keep businesses closed.
In Nashville, downtown Broadway is a major economic engine for the city.
It's a tourist hot spot filled with bars, restaurants, and many attractions.
But Nashville Mayor John Cooper ordered many of these bars and restaurants to stay closed or operate at limited capacity due to COVID.
This was intended to slow the spread.
However, many of these businesses are going out of business because of the strict lockdown orders!
Now it turns out that the shutdown may have been over-exaggerated for no reason!
The mayor's office had knowledge that hardly anyone contracted COVID from bars or restaurants in the city!
Yet despite this knowledge, they continued to impose strict lockdown orders…AND raise property taxes!
More details below:
The scandal has been ignored by most major news outlets.
However, it is quickly earning attention online.
Local Fox 17 confirms:
The coronavirus cases on lower Broadway may have been so low that the mayor’s office and the Metro Health Department decided to keep it secret.
Emails between the mayor’s senior advisor and the health department reveal only a partial picture. But what they reveal is disturbing.
The discussion involves the low number of coronavirus cases emerging from bars and restaurants and how to handle that.
And most disturbingly, how to keep it from the public.
On June 30th, contact tracing was given a small view of coronavirus clusters. Construction and nursing homes were found to be causing problems with more than a thousand cases traced to each category, but bars and restaurants reported just 22 cases.
Leslie Waller from the health department asks, “This isn’t going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor’s Office?"
“Correct, not for public consumption,” writes senior advisor Benjamin Eagles.
A month later, the health department was asked point blank about the rumor there are only 80 cases traced to bars and restaurants.
Reporter Nate Rau asks, “The figure you gave of 'more than 80' does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn’t that mean restaurants and bars aren’t a very big problem?"
Health department official Brian Todd asked five health department officials, "Please advise how you recommend I respond. "
The name at the top of the response is clipped off but you may find the answer unacceptable.
“My two cents. We have certainly refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are low per site.
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."
Neither the health department nor the mayor’s office would confirm the authenticity of the emails but councilmember Steve Glover had a Metro staff attorney inquire. Here’s the official answer:
“I was able to get verification from the Mayor’s Office and the Department of Health that these emails are real,” the staff attorney answered.
Glover says this is Metro Nashville orchestrating a cover up.
"They are fabricating information," Glover said. "They’ve blown there entire credibility Dennis. Its gone, I don’t trust a thing they say going forward ...nothing."
Glover says he has been contacted by an endless stream of downtown bartenders, waitresses and restaurant owners asking why would officials not release these numbers?
"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.
A screenshot of one of the leaked emails can be seen below:
It's been well documented that COVID is most dangerous in nursing homes.
The same was true according to Nashville's numbers.
Could this be why the mayor's office hid the actual number of COVID cases contact traced to restaurants and bars?
The National Review confirms the story:
Officials in Nashville, Tn. concealed from the media how few coronavirus cases had been traced to bars and restaurants in the city, according to emails sent between the mayor’s office and the city’s health department.
Emails obtained by FOX 17 News appear to show that the two offices seemingly conspired to conceal data showing that while construction and nursing homes led to more than a thousand cases each as of June 30th, only 22 cases had been traced to bars and restaurants.
In a discussion of the numbers, Leslie Waller from the health department asked, “This isn’t going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor’s Office?”
“Correct, not for public consumption,” replied senior advisor Benjamin Eagles.
The next month, in response to rumors that only 80 cases had been traced to bars and restaurants, a Tennessean reporter asked, “The figure you gave of ‘more than 80’ does lead to a natural question: If there have been over 20,000 positive cases of COVID-19 in Davidson and only 80 or so are traced to restaurants and bars, doesn’t that mean restaurants and bars aren’t a very big problem?”
Health department official Brian Todd asked five health department officials for assistance in responding to the reporter: “Please advise how you recommend I respond.“
[...]
Glover accused the city of covering up the data and “fabricating information.”
“They’ve blown their entire credibility,” he said. “It’s gone, I don’t trust a thing they say going forward …nothing.”
The councilman said many bartenders, waitresses, and restaurant owners from downtown Nashville have reached out asking why officials wouldn’t release those numbers.
We need transparency and honesty at all levels of government!
This is why President Trump has such strong support!
He is transparent and honest with the country.
He is who he is and is not ashamed of it!
It's time for all of our leaders to be HONEST with us and to do what is truly best for the people they claim to represent.
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