E-Mails Indicate Nashville Mayor’s Office HID Low COVID Transmission Rates In Bars & Restaurants To Keep Pushing Lockdowns

P. Gardner Goldsmith | September 18, 2020

(UPDATE 9/20/20 WZTV has since noted that it's claim is incorrect.  WZTV’s news director Bryan McGruder has said his news team “incorrectly asserted that Mayor Cooper’s office withheld COVID-19 data from the public, which implied that there had been a coverup." The station has apologized for the error and oversight in their reporting.)

 

 

A local Fox TV affiliate’s coverage of a breaking Nashville, TN, story is thundering across the US, and adding justified fuel to anger over unjustified, unconstitutional COVID19 crackdowns.

WZTV17 reporter Dennis Ferrier showed viewers and readers that, over the summer, Nashville Mayor John Cooper’s senior advisor and the head of his health department exchanged e-mails about the low number of COVID19-related infections attributed to city bars and restaurants. And Ferrier revealed what appear to be exchanges by those tax-funded bureaucrats concerning how they did not want that positive information getting out to 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.

 

 

It’s data that’s not trustworthy in the first place and, likely, inflated, since the test is unreliable as a diagnostic tool, and since the federal government has created perverse financial incentives for medical staff to inflate the number of claimed COVID19 infections. But, as with “anthropogenic climate change”, let’s pretend to believe what the government says are the numbers.

In e-mails that the TV station and City Council member Steve Glover were able to obtain and confirm only after Glover got a Metro Nashville attorney to inquire, Ferrier discovered this not-so auspicious start of an e-mail thread within the halls of the Mayor’s bureaucracy:

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.

And it gets worse. Ferrier notes that Mayor Cooper’s auspicious, tax-gobbling COVID-Crackdown promoters received an inquiry from another reporter who had dug into the numbers, and they were not pleased at the time.

A month later, the health department was asked point blank about the rumor there are only 80 cases traced to bars and restaurants… Tennessee Lookout 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?’

And wouldn’t that mean that the continuation of the unconstitutional lockdowns is even more of an insult to the private bar and restaurant owners, workers, and clientele?

Well, this is John Cooper and his staff we’re talking about here, and Cooper is the leftist who not only got a 32 percent tax increase at a time when he was putting people out of work, he also prohibited musicians from recording in anything but traditional studios – essentially banning home studios (what anyone with a mic and a laptop has at his disposal now). And Mr. Cooper’s poisonous fruit does not fall far from the tree.

Inside the Governor’s great government halls, Health Department official Brian Todd asked someone on staff how to respond to reporter Rau, and he received this reply:

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.

Yes. Though the copy obtained by Ferrier cut off the name of the bureaucrat who offered that final, wonderful, message, City Council member Glover’s work with a lawyer was able to squeeze an admission from the Mayor’s office confirming that the message was real.

And Glover told WZTV:

They are fabricating information. They’ve blown their entire credibility Dennis. It’s gone, I don’t trust a thing they say going forward... nothing.

And that’s the best advice anyone associated with the Nashville government has offered for a long, long time.

In a follow-up report, Ferrier notes:

(T)he Restaurant Association estimates that up to 50 percent of bars and restaurants will close forever if the city is not opened in the next six weeks.

And he observes:

Let's go back to June 30th, the Metro Health Department tells Mayor Cooper's office that only 22 COVID-19 cases have been linked to bars and restaurants in the four months since March. Just 4 days later, the city closes bars.

Incredible.

Condemnation of the Mayor and his underlings is intense, justified, and spreading.

And appreciation for real reporters such as Ferrier and Rau is growing, nationwide.

The farce of COVID19 crackdowns is not funny. It’s harming people, and the Mayor’s Office in Nashville cannot hide what these reports reveal. One wonders how many folks will visit the Mayor’s wonderful website, find the phone number of his office, and call to offer him their thoughts.