Biden’s new HHS pick notable not only for breaking another glass ceiling but for her COVID hypocrisy

Biden’s new HHS pick notable not only for breaking another glass ceiling but for her COVID hypocrisy
Rachel Levine (Image: CBS News screen grab)

Joe Biden continues to make good on his promise (threat?) to have the most diverse administration in history. Today he announced that Dr. Rachel Levine will serve as the assistant Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, making her the potentially the first transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate. As Biden recently said with regard to his many token appointment, “I may not be much, but I know how to pick ’em.”

He was partly right: He isn’t much. But as for knowing “how to pick ’em,” a number of his designees have come with baggage that may prove problematic to their confirmation. The stumbling block for Levine may be her past actions regarding COVID-19, the issue that arguably got Biden elected.

As the Daily Caller reported back in May, while functioning as health secretary of Pennsylvania Levine took a page out of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s playbook. On March 18, 2020 she ordered all nursing homes and long-term facilities in the state to accept COVID-19-positive patients from hospitals.

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But she wasn’t finished. On March 29, she quietly moved her 95-year-old mother out of a nursing home. When a local news station got wind of the hypocritical move and reported it, she released a statement:

My mother requested, and my sister and I as her children complied to move her to another location during the Covid-19 outbreak. My mother is 95 years old. She is very intelligent and more than competent to make her own decisions.

Many of the people whose elderly relatives were ordered into nursing homes by government fiat might offer up the same charitable description of their loved one. (RELATED: Politico writer ignores Pelosi’s blatant hypocrisy, worries instead that her privacy was violated)

To date two thirds of COVID deaths in Pennsylvania occurred in nursing homes.

And now Joe Biden wants to assign a prominent role in HHS to the person so that he can check off another box on his diversity check list.

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy

Howard Portnoy has written for The Blaze, HotAir, NewsBusters, Weasel Zippers, Conservative Firing Line, RedCounty, and New York’s Daily News. He has one published novel, Hot Rain, (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), and has been a guest on Radio Vice Online with Jim Vicevich, The Alana Burke Show, Smart Life with Dr. Gina, and The George Espenlaub Show.

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