Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo will testify next week before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about his administration’s handling of Covid — including his controversial decision to force nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients.
The committee will question Cuomo on September 10 about the “unscientific guidance” that prompted his nursing-home decree. Committee members privately questioned Cuomo in June, at which point, he was “shockingly callous when discussing New York’s nursing home mortality rate,” the committee said on social media, and he “repeatedly deflected responsibility for issuing the nursing home directive.”
“Andrew Cuomo owes answers to the 15,000 families who lost loved ones in New York’s nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) said. “On September 10, Americans will have the opportunity to hear directly from the former governor about New York’s potentially fatal nursing home policies.”
Cuomo’s Covid guidance earned him an Emmy “in recognition of his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world” and a $5 million book deal. Meanwhile, Cuomo was overseeing the New York State Department of Health’s mass undercounting of Covid-related deaths among nursing-home residents. Cuomo issued an advisory in March 2020 that forced nursing homes to accept patients, even if they tested positive for Covid.
New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) found the nursing-home deaths were undercounted by as much as 50 percent, resulting in thousands of deaths being hidden from the public. A separate report by the Empire Center for Public Policy, an independent think tank, concluded Cuomo’s nursing home order potentially caused over one thousand additional nursing-home deaths.
“I’m trying to learn why he would do something like this,” Wenstrup said. “As a doctor who has treated infections, it goes against all medical common sense to take someone who was highly contagious and put them amongst the most vulnerable.”
Cuomo’s spokesman Rich Azzopardi said that the committee was engaging in “false political attacks blaming New York for nursing home deaths despite the fact that New York was following guidance from Trump’s CDC and CMS.”
“More than a dozen other states – Democratic and Republican – followed the same guidance or as one of those state’s leaders, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, put it, ‘This was federal guidance. This was what everyone was doing,'” Azzopardi said. “They refuse to look in the mirror at their own anti-science policies that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths or call the one witness who is most relevant and was supposed to lead the entire effort: Donald Trump.”
The subcommittee’s Democratic staff warned that Republicans might compare Cuomo’s pandemic track record to vice presidential Tim Walz’s, according to Politico. “In anticipation of Select Subcommittee Republicans echoing these claims during the upcoming hearing, we evaluated the merit of these allegations and determined that they are inaccurate,” Democrats reportedly wrote.
“A true leader owns up to his mistakes and takes responsibility for wrongdoing. That is not what we saw from Mr. Cuomo during his term as governor nor during his transcribed interview. We hope that during his public hearing next week, Mr. Cuomo will stop dodging accountability and honestly answer the American people,” Wenstrup said.