Former Mayor De Blasio’s government overstocked medical equipment by selling excess medical equipments on auctions at low prices.
Post Covid-19 medical equipment worth $225 million is in surplus. This surplus equipment is to be auctioned off for just $500,000 by the city officials. Almost 28 truckloads for a Long Island junk dealer have been reported to take away once scarce devices. It was predicted by Former Mayor Bill de Blasio back then that these devices would help beat the pandemic and prepare for future ones.
Some of the equipment was also overpaid as per reports including face shields which were $3.67 at the start of the pandemic and were bought at $6.70 by De Blasio’s administration as per the information given by Comptroller Brad Lander.
The City blames the massive lot of 701,000 face shields and other decisions to make panic purchases without allowing to scrutinize the emergency contracts by Comptroller Scott Stringer. These 701,000 shields were put to auction with a bid of $1000 or 0.14 cents at the opening.
The City further blames the controversial contract of New-Jersey-based Digital Gadgets ventilators providing company that failed to deliver them and replaced them with N95 masks instead. The contract was worth $9.1 million.
The masks so delivered were also not in great condition and were of poor quality without FDA certification for which the company had charged $4 each compared to the average price of $3.10 says Lander.
A major donor to De Blasio and Gov. Hochul, Charlie Tebele owned the digital gadgets both being Democrats. The company had charged the state $637 million i.e. double times the ongoing rate for Covid-19 kits that critics state to be “pay-for-play”.
Senate Andrea Stewart Majority Leader of the state said she had word with Hochul and further added that there was no wrongdoing involved thus rejecting Republicans’ claims to have an investigation.
Despite her claim, the material bought by the state during De Blasio’s has 2,800 expired hand sanitizing wipes that the officials tried to sell on 12th Jan having shelf life up to Jan 31 for $56,000.
It was also seen that the official handling sales in the Department of Citywide Administrative Services raised a concern through an email internally in July 2022 that if it came to notice in the eyes of the public it would lead to a probe into the matter. The Email further crafted talking points consulting Mayor Eric Adam’s office according to The City.
“Thankfully, New Yorkers and our heroic frontline medical workers came together to avert some of the worst-case scenarios,” Benson added.
All this along with the debates and blame games points out that there has been a major blunder in the administrative planning, strategy, and assignment of resources by the previous government. Many states have been through the issue of over-stalking of the materials and covid health facilities resulting in the waste of resources and dumping value of them.
