Exclusive – Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo showed no regret for his administration’s policies requiring nursing homes to admit COVID-19 positive patients in the early months of the pandemic, according to Republican Rep. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) who was involved in questioning the former governor on Tuesday.
The former governor, who resigned in late 2021 following months of scandal, testified under subpoena before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a closed-door transcribed interview session regarding the March 25, 2020, the New York Department of Health directive prohibiting nursing homes from denying admission to COVID-positive patients.
Malliotakis, the only New York delegate on the subcommittee, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview that Cuomo blamed the creation of the policy on an “unknown staffer at the Department of Health.”
“It’s frustrating that after nearly four years of seeking answers to what happened exactly here, what led to the executive order, he’s trying to blame an unknown staffer at the Department of Health” said Malliotakis.
According to Malliotakis, Cuomo also claimed that he knew nothing of the executive order until a month after it was issued, when his office began receiving media inquiries.
Malliotakis said that was very hard to believe, considering that Cuomo held daily briefings on the latest news of the COVID pandemic in the Empire State from March 2 until June 19, 2020.
“Is it that the governor did not know what was going on in his own state?” asked Malliotakis. “Everybody else knew about it, all the local legislators, all the state legislators. The nursing homes were complaining about it to our offices.”
Malliotakis, who served at the state level in the New York State Assembly until January 2021, said that she and her colleagues reported the issue to the Executive Chamber after being contacted by numerous constituents.
The New York representative also said that Cuomo placed blame on the Trump Administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for issuing recommendations that nursing homes continue to care for COVID-positive patients.
Local news outlet WRGB-Albany received a copy of Cuomo’s opening remarks for the closed-door interview.
“It was in black-and-white in the CDC and CMS guidelines,” reads Cuomo’s prepared opening statement. “The medical theory was that the patients being released from hospitals were not infectious and discharges were conditioned on nursing homes having transmission based precautions in place.”
Malliotakis told the Washington Examiner that the recommendations and guidance from CMS and CDC were different in kind from the mandate policy.
Cuomo also said in his opening statement that several other states, with Democrat and Republican administrations, implemented similar nursing home policies, but only Democratic states were investigated under the Trump administration’s Department of Justice for their policies.
Evidence from Cuomo’s impeachment inquiry, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, found that the number of nursing home deaths from the policy could have been as high as 9,844, and that the Department of Health significantly underreported deaths. The number is hotly disputed, with Cuomo citing asymptomatic positive nursing home workers as the cause of the high death toll.
The Washington Examiner contacted the spokesperson for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, with request for comment.
