In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of half-baked medical information that was disseminated — a lot of it from the federal government. Much of it was later found to be wholly made-up.
Perhaps the most inexplicable medical advice was a mandate from then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that senior citizens with COVID-19 must be admitted to nursing homes. This "must admit" policy was supposed to free up beds in hospitals. The results were catastrophic. More than 15,000 New Yorkers died in nursing homes from March 2020 through June 2021.
Cuomo has never explained why he initiated the policy. Only four other states imposed the same policy on nursing homes. But what makes Cuomo's sins different is that he then proceeded to fudge the number of nursing home deaths by as much as 50%.
Cuomo will now have the chance to come clean and explain his actions during an open hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic next Monday. The former governor appeared in a closed-door session of the committee in June where members grilled him for seven hours about his stupidity in initiating the "must admit" policy, his criminal cover-up of the facts of how many people died in nursing homes, and his refusal to take any responsibility for his actions.
Just as he did in the book he would later publish, Cuomo has continued to try to place the blame absolutely anywhere but on his own shoulders. He claims that an aide wrote the original memo mandating that COVID patients had to be admitted to nursing homes. He also placed the blame on the Trump administration for their original guidance, though none of the federal guidelines delivered mandates. They only offered suggestions based on the little we knew about the virus in 2020. By contrast, Cuomo was issuing orders with stiff penalties threatened for those who did not comply.
Shaw continues:
Cuomo then goes on to attempt to use the, "if I only knew then what I know now" argument, but it falls rather flat. He sagely nods about his deadly, failed policies and says, "We all know what happened next." And that's true, Governor. We do know. People died in the droves. But this was more than a simple case of not understanding the transmission factors with this virus (which were honestly barely different than transmission protocols for the common flu.) This was a case of selective transmission. You locked down the healthy offspring of people in the nursing homes, deeming it too dangerous to allow them into the facilities. They were forced to watch from afar as their elderly family members died. But other, contagious patients were regularly wheeled in to stay in the same rooms with them.
As far as I can tell, no one has ever been fired from their government job for giving out wrong information about COVID-19. No one has ever been fired from their government job in any state for the half trillion dollars in fraudulent payouts from COVID relief programs.
No bureaucrat has ever been convicted of gross negligence and sent to jail. They have stonewalled, lied, practiced misdirection, and ignored the questions that cry out for answers.
More than a million Americans died uselessly unless we can learn lessons from this pandemic and develop protocols, rules, and procedures to prevent them from happening again.
It starts with getting the truth of what happened from officials like Cuomo.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member