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| John Hart/Wisconsin State Journal via AP, File |
One evening in May, nursing assistant Debra Ragoonanan’s vision blurred during her shift at a state-run Massachusetts veterans home. As her head spun, she said, she called her husband. He picked her up and drove her to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.
It was the latest in a drumbeat of health issues that she traces to the first months of 2020, when dozens of veterans died at the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke, in one of the country’s deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks at a long-term nursing facility. Ragoonanan has worked at the home for nearly 30 years. Now, she said, the sights, sounds, and smells there trigger her trauma. Among her ailments, she lists panic attacks, brain fog, and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition linked to aneurysms and strokes.
Scrutiny of the outbreak prompted the state to change the facility’s name to the Massachusetts Veterans Home at Holyoke, replace its leadership, sponsor a $480 million renovation of the premises, and agree to a $56 million settlement for veterans and families. But the front-line caregivers have received little relief as they grapple with the outbreak’s toll.
“I am retraumatized all the time,” Ragoonanan said, sitting on her back porch before her evening shift. “How am I supposed to move forward?”
COVID killed more than 3,600 U.S. health care workers in the first year of the pandemic. It left many more with physical and mental illnesses — and a gutting sense of abandonment.
What workers experienced has been detailed in state investigations, surveys of nurses, and published studies. These found that many health care workers weren’t given masks in 2020. Many got COVID and worked while sick. More than a dozen lawsuits filed on behalf of residents or workers at nursing facilities detail such experiences. And others allege that accommodations weren’t made for workers facing depression and PTSD triggered by their pandemic duties. Some of the lawsuits have been dismissed, and others are pending.
Health care workers and unions reported risky conditions to state and federal agencies. But the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration had fewer inspectors in 2020 to investigate complaints than at any point in a half-century. It investigated only about 1 in 5 COVID-related complaints that were filed officially, and just 4% of more than 16,000 informal reports made by phone or email.
Nursing assistants, health aides, and other lower-wage health care workers were particularly vulnerable during outbreaks, and many remain burdened now. About 80% of lower-wage workers who provide long-term care are women, and these workers are more likely to be immigrants, to be people of color, and to live in poverty than doctors or nurses. --->READ MORE HERE
A controversial Manhattan nonprofit — which was suspended in May from receiving any more federal funds after funneling more than half a million in taxpayer dollars to the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic — was asking for millions more in July to study dangerous viruses, The Post can exclusively reveal.
EcoHealth Alliance had “pending” grants for potentially risky viral research from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that totaled nearly $4 million and were slated to start in July 2024, according to records obtained by the taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste and shared with The Post.
Those projects included a $3,450,622.08 grant for research to “[d]etermine the frequency of exposure to filoviruses and henipaviruses among people in rural Liberia, identify bat reservoirs for those viruses, and characterize risk factors for human exposure” until June 2029.
Another $360,916.37 grant was to “[c]onduct a serosurvey of humans and domestic animals in a rural community in Ghana where an outbreak of Marburg virus originated to determine the extent of filovirus exposure and associated risk factors” until June 2026.
Both grants listed the place of performance as the nonprofit’s New York City location, but neither was funded, according to a review of federal grant databases, before the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suspended EcoHealth Alliance in May and proposed it for a three-year debarment.
“All federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance has been halted,” a spokesperson told The Post. “EcoHealth Alliance is not conducting research on Marburg virus and does not conduct laboratory research in New York City.”
Justin Goodman, a senior vice president at White Coat Waste, told The Post it got the records after filing a Colorado Public Records Act request pursuant to another multimillion-dollar grant to import bats to a state university and conduct experiments with SARS-CoV-2 and the Nipah and Ebola viruses.
That project at Colorado State University was first reported last year by the Daily Mail. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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