Disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo bragged to a congressional committee earlier this year that he had tapped “Contagion” director Steven Soderbergh to discuss his administration's COVID-19 response.
The 66-year-old Democrat appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on COVID-19 in June to answer tough questions about his response to the outbreak, including the disastrous decision to forcibly house 9,000 patients recovering from COVID-19 in the state's nursing homes.
But Cuomo, who won a special Emmy award for his press conferences early in the pandemic, had to rely on a little star power when asked to deliver his opening statement.
“There's a movie from 2010 called Contagion. I want you to watch it,” Cuomo instructed House COVID Subcommittee members and staff on June 11. “It's a great movie. It has Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne in it. It's from 2010, and we brought him in during the COVID pandemic. We had daily briefings with director Steven Soderbergh.”
“So I asked him, 'How was it so prophetic to make a movie 10 years ago, in 2010, about basically the same thing that's happened with COVID?'” Cuomo recalled. “And he said, 'If you've seen Ebola, if you've seen Zika, if you've seen the response to those, you knew what the response would be.'”
Gov. Cuomo shared the anecdote as part of an intense private interview with his COVID committee, which has been investigating the U.S. public health response to SARS-CoV-2 and its origins.
“The challenge is to figure out what we did, what we did wrong, Monday morning quarterback,” the former governor said in his testimony, which avoided responsibility for both his March 25, 2020, order that hospitalized COVID patients “must be admitted” to nursing homes and his attempt to “cover up” the resulting deaths. Subcommittee Report.
“I know I lost the match, but what are we going to do now?” he said, trying to justify himself. “It's going to happen again. It's only a matter of time.”
“Contagion” tells the story of a deadly global pandemic that originates from animal-human contact in Hong Kong.
Governor Cuomo won an Emmy Award in November 2020 for his public briefings on the coronavirus, but the award was subsequently stripped after a series of sexual harassment allegations arose and he resigned in August 2021.
A spokesperson for the former governor told The Post that Soderbergh was one of hundreds of people who contacted Cuomo since the pandemic began.
