Andrew Cuomo Personally Edited State Report to Hide Nursing-Home Covid Deaths, House Panel Concludes

Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo personally edited a government report that undercounted the Covid deaths that resulted from his March 2020 directive forcing nursing homes to admit coronavirus-positive patients, a congressional panel concluded.

The New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) issued a report in July 2020 faulting nursing homes for the spread of coronavirus in their facilities at the direction of Cuomo administration officials who “heavily edited” the document, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic said in a memo released Monday.

“The Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19. Today’s memo holds Mr. Cuomo and his team accountable for their failures and provides the most detailed and comprehensive accounting of New York’s pandemic-era wrongdoing,” said Representative Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee. The memo is based on almost 555,000 pages of documents and over 50 hours of sworn testimony.

A few high-ranking Cuomo administration officials were involved in the NYSDOH report, including Cuomo adviser Jim Malatras, who testified that Cuomo reviewed and edited the document multiple times. His statement is consistent with an impeachment report issued to New York’s state assembly judiciary committee in November 2021.

Cuomo transmitted the messages through various aides and handwritten notes, Malatras said. Cuomo denied playing any role in the report’s creation, despite evidence to the contrary.

In June 2020, Cuomo dispatched one of his assistants to order his team to draft the report in an effort to counter the public scrutiny of his administration’s nursing-home directive, which required senior-care facilities to admit Covid-positive patients being transferred from hospitals, in order to relieve pressure on those hospitals.

The former governor is set to testify publicly Tuesday about the directive and his administration’s apparent coverup of the death total. More than 9,000 Covid-positive patients were admitted to nursing homes because of the “must-admit” order.

In an email, Cuomo assistant Stephanie Benson said the directive would be the “great debacle in the history books” and directed top aides to “[g]et a report on the facts” to prevent it from clouding Cuomo’s legacy.

Malatras testified that the email was understood to be an order from Cuomo in response to a news story. The NYSDOH had begun compiling data for a peer-reviewed study, but the peer-review process was cast aside because of the pressure to develop the report quickly.

Dr. Eleanor Adams, a former NYSDOH official, testified that the department did not independently author the report and clarified that it was not a peer-reviewed scientific publication.

Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s top aide, and Linda Lacewell, another Cuomo confidant and former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, were among the executive-chamber officials involved in crafting the report, even though they lacked scientific expertise. Outside of Cuomo’s inner circle, Greater New York Hospital Association president Kenneth Raske and Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling participated in the NYSDOH report.

Executive chamber officials were the ones who decided to remove out-of-facility deaths from the report’s nursing home data, artificially undercounting the death total. The Cuomo administration had counted those out-of-facility deaths among the nursing-home death totals until May 2020.

“No, but I don’t know how to express — let’s say there’s a 3,000 differential, 2,500. Who cares? What difference does it make in any dimension to anyone about anything? Do you know what I’m saying?” Cuomo testified in response to a question about whether they should be undercounting death statistics.

Dr. Howard Zucker, former NYSDOH commissioner, said the directive came about after the Greater New York Hospital Association called Cuomo about the need for recovered individuals to leave hospitals after receiving treatment for Covid-19. Zucker and former NYSDOH deputy commissioner Brad Hutton both testified that Cuomo’s executive chamber would have approved the nursing-home directive before it was issued.

Beth Garvey, former special counsel to Cuomo, testified that she participated in the approval process. She and multiple other executive chamber officials were copied on an email about the approved directive on March 25, the day it was issued. Cuomo and DeRosa both said they were not part of the approval process and only learned about the directive at a press conference the following month. The directive was not consistent with federal guidance and Cuomo admitted that it was only rescinded because of public outcry.

The nursing home scandal and allegations of sexual harassment tanked Cuomo’s political career in August 2021 after a decade in the governor’s mansion. Cuomo has consistently denied the sexual harassment allegations, and no criminal charges have been brought against him.