One of the biggest villains of the pandemic, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, testified behind closed doors before Congress on Tuesday. But his negligence and criminal actions in covering up COVID deaths in nursing homes are already on the record.
We'll never get an accurate death toll in New York nursing homes from Cuomo's mismanagement, stupidity, and criminal negligence in handling the pandemic. His order that placed infected patients back into nursing homes in order to avoid the "stigma" of COVID-19 sentenced hundreds of people to their deaths.
You might recall from the early days of the pandemic the left-wing narrative that people with COVID were unfairly "stigmatized" for being sick. Of course they were stigmatized. They were infected with a disease that was killing some people. And letting COVID-positive people loose in nursing homes was sentencing hundreds of old people to death.
Cuomo made things infinitely worse by lying about the severity of the outbreak in nursing homes and lying about the number of deaths in the facilities.
An audit released by the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, in March 2022 "found that Health Department officials at times underreported the full death toll by as much as 50 percent from April 2020 to February 2021," according to the New York Times.
Cuomo has pushed back on these claims, insisting New York’s health department was following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) guidance issued by the Trump administration before Cuomo’s order.
In his opening remarks [before the House subcommitte on the coronavirus on Tuesday] Cuomo said "any serious review must stop asking political questions and start asking fact-based ones." He pointed out that New York was "No. 39 in terms of pro rata nursing home deaths [despite the state] being ground zero for COVID."
He also accused the Trump administration of targeting Democrat-led states "despite both red and blue states issuing" the same guidelines.
“Our audit findings are extremely troubling,” DiNapoli said in a statement. “The public was misled by those at the highest level of state government through distortion and suppression of the facts when New Yorkers deserved the truth.”
The Times concluded "that the Health Department often acquiesced to the narrative Mr. Cuomo and his top officials wanted to promote during the pandemic, sometimes failing to meet its “ethical” and “moral” imperatives to act transparently."
Go ahead and blame Washington, weasel. You can't avoid responsibility for your own policies and lies.
"I felt like the governor was defensive throughout most of the day, often putting blame on other people rather than himself. [He] didn’t seem to be taking a lot of responsibility for the things that were happening," Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) called Cuomo a "phony" and a "fraud" who "put our most vulnerable population at risk."
"And it was Andrew Cuomo who covered it up," Lawler added. "It wasn’t just the directive, which was bad enough and idiotic and resulted in the death of the 15,000-plus seniors. It was Andrew Cuomo, for political purposes, who directed the state government to cover up the death toll."
Cuomo said after the hearing that it wasn't his fault. It was the federal government's fault.
"We have two very different opinions on what happened during COVID," Cuomo told a reporter. "I think the federal government failed this nation. And it was abysmal. How did COVID get to the U.S. in December and nobody knew? How did it take so many months before we had … basic testing in place? How did we have a president running around saying, ‘It's going to be gone when the weather gets warm?' … who then admits to a reporter that he purposely downplayed it?"
For the record, Trump and the entire federal government were totally in the dark about COVID-19. Not because of incompetence (there was plenty of that in the early weeks of the pandemic) but because the Chinese Communists were covering up everything about the new virus. They knew they'd be blamed. The delay of several months in the Chinese even giving information to the World Health Organization resulted in more than 7 million deaths.
Cuomo is not entirely at fault. He, too, was operating out of ignorance. But his decision to place sick people with a known contagious disease with healthier people just because COVID-positive patients were being stigmatized condemned thousands of people to death.
