BREAKING: Funeral Directors in COVID-19 Epicenter Doubt Legitimacy of Deaths Attributed to Pandemic, Fear Numbers are 'Padded'

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[Mamaroneck, N.Y.—April 30, 2020] Project Veritas today released another video featuring conversations with funeral home directors and their staff throughout New York City questioning the number of deaths officially attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In late April, a Project Veritas reporter spoke with Michael Lanza, the director of Staten
Island’s Colonial Funeral Home.

“To be honest with you, all of the death certificates are writing COVID on it, they’re writing
COVID on all the death certificates,” Lanza said.

Lanza said DeBlasio might see inflated COVID death tallies as a way to bring more money to New York City. “Whether they had a positive test or didn’t, so I think again this is my
personal opinion, I think like the mayor and our city--they’re looking for federal funding and the more they put COVID on the death certificate the more they can ask from the federal funds.”

The Staten Island funeral director said it did not add up to him.

“I think it’s political, so, I’m going to turn around and say: ‘You know, like, not everybody
that we have here that has COVID on the death certificate died of COVID.’ Can I prove that? No, but that is my suspicion.”

Josephine DiMiceli, president of the DiMiceli and Sons, a Queens-based funeral service told a Project Veritas journalist that a Supreme Court justice got involved in one case of a non-COVID-19 death that was listed as a casualty of the pandemic.

The sister of a deceased woman called DiMiceli and told her late sister suffered with
Alzheimer’s Disease and was not treated for COVID-19, she said.

“The sister refused to believe that her sister had COVID-19 and like I said, she was the one that said to me she says well my cousin is you know, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,” DiMiceli said. “We’re gonna get an autopsy,’ and I said do what you gotta do, you know and she did what she had to do and sure enough I called her and I said to her that the doctor signed the death certificate did the autopsy – no COVID-19.”

DiMiceli said to the journalist that she was curious about who the justice was, but she was too busy and too sensitive to a grieving relative to ask for the name. “I wanted to ask
her, but I was like you know what, I’m so busy I just can’t, you know I mean like you can’t ask.”

Joseph Antioco, the director of Brooklyn’s Schaeffer Funeral Home, told another undercover journalist if the deceased was not under the care of a private physician, the
chances were very good their cause of death was going down as COVID-19.

“Two weeks ago, I had a 40-year-old man that died in his house, okay? They didn’t even go to the house, the guy had no underlying causes, no medical conditions, they released
him from the house without even going saying he had COVID-19 because he had a fever,” he said.

“But now, how do you know that’s what he had? You don’t. But, now the death certificate showed shows that he had COVID-19,” he said.

“If you don’t have a private doctor and you weren’t under any medical care, they’re automatically putting down on the death certificate COVID-19, because they don’t wanna go--they’re so overwhelmed,” Antioco said. “They’re putting everything as COVID-19, so
they’re padding the numbers.”

The Brooklyn funeral director said one reason the COVID-19 numbers are inflated is that personnel in the coroner’s office cannot keep up.

“They’re not going out to houses anymore,” he said. “They would go out to the house, they would investigate the scene, they would do some testing at the scene and then come up
with a conclusion as to: ‘He had heart disease.’”

Antioco said when medical examiners are too busy and not looking to travel, COVID-19 has become the go-to cause of death. “How many of them are actually COVID-19? Or is the
M.E.(Medical Examiner) just putting that because they don’t want to go to the scene?”

O’Keefe said Project Veritas continues to investigate the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic at the federal, state and local level through both undercover journalists and
insiders.