Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is scheduled to testify next week before a House committee investigating his administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic, including his infamous order that forced infected patients into nursing homes.
The House Select Subcommittee on COVID-19 announced Tuesday that it is preparing to question the former New York governor on Sept. 10 about “unscientific guidance” that led to the deaths of thousands of seniors.
“Governor Andrew Cuomo owes an accountability to the 15,000 families who have lost loved ones in New York nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).
Wenstrup added that the COVID subcommittee had already conducted a private interview with Governor Cuomo in June, in which he came across as “stunningly callous.”
During the seven-hour ordeal, subcommittee members expressed similar sentiments after pressing Governor Cuomo about his March 25, 2020, “mandatory hospitalization” order that placed COVID-positive patients in elderly care facilities across the state.
“I don't sense a lot of remorse,” Rep. Mariannette Miller Meeks (R-Iowa), one of the doctors on the committee, told reporters during a break in testimony.
“He's just sticking to what he read in the book that he published,” quipped Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-N.Y.), Cuomo's 2018 opponent, referring to the governor's $5 million book deal he signed in the middle of the pandemic that praised his leadership.
The 66-year-old former governor criticized the Trump Justice Department's “nuclearized” investigation into the nursing home mandate while acknowledging that a member of his own staff drafted the order, but still blamed the federal government for providing the initial guidance.
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have said to the Department of Health, 'Don't listen to the federal government. They don't know what they're talking about,'” Cuomo told reporters. “Because the facts now show, you know what happened in nursing homes.”
Lawmakers disputed that explanation, pointing out that unlike New York's order, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, has not enforced anything.
During a May 2023 special subcommittee hearing, Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), a physician and former chief medical officer for Sacramento County, also called New York’s directive “a scourge to the state.”Medical malpractice.”
An independent report released in 2021 by the New York Bar Association and the Empire Public Policy Center concluded that “forced admissions” orders at nursing homes led to hundreds of additional deaths.
New York Attorney General Letitia James' office found that the governor's administration undercounted nursing home deaths that year. It increased by more than 50%.
Across the state's 62 nursing homes, Governor Cuomo undercounted COVID-19 deaths by an average of 56.%, 76 page report show.
Health Commissioner Howard Zucker then released the complete internal data, showing the COVID-19 death toll increasing from 8,711 to 12,743.
Cuomo's chief of staff, Melissa DeRosa, also appeared in a recorded interview with the House COVID-19 Committee and privately acknowledged to Democratic state lawmakers that the agency initially hid the data for fear of a Justice Department investigation.
In 2022, the New York State Comptroller found that Cuomo's health department “misled the public” by leaving out at least 4,100 nursing home deaths from COVID-19, “conforming to the administration's explanation,” referring to Cuomo.
A recent report released in June by consulting firm the Olson Group said Governor Cuomo made a “serious and unnecessary mistake” by ignoring established health department protocols for dealing with the pandemic and taking control away from local communities.
“If the state had used the plans that were already created and available, certainly there would have been proper planning in place,” one official said during the company's investigation, “but instead we've been shackled by all these executive orders.”
More than 84,000 people have died from COVID-19 in New York during the pandemic, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“Governor Andrew Cuomo was trying to shift the blame for clear directives,” Molinaro told reporters during a break in an interview in June. “After they realized these directives were causing huge losses, they falsified the books to show the number of nursing home deaths was far lower than we knew.”
The transcript of the interview has not yet been made public, but the COVID subcommittee said Cuomo He ignored a direct question about the undercount of nursing home deaths.
“True leaders admit their mistakes and take responsibility for any wrongdoing,” Gov. Wenstrup said in a statement Tuesday. “That is not what we have seen from Mr. Cuomo during his tenure as governor or in any of his recorded interviews.”
“We are hopeful that at his hearing next week, Mr. Cuomo will stop avoiding accountability and give honest answers to the American people,” he added.
Governor Cuomo's spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, mocked the COVID subcommittee, accusing it of conducting “false political attacks.”
“From the beginning, MAGA Republicans have used this farcical committee – led by a podiatrist and including President Trump's physician and a QAnon PhD representative – to launch partisan attacks on people like Dr. Anthony Fauci who have helped our country get through COVID-19,” Azzopardi said in a statement.
“The committee continues its false political attacks blaming New York state for nursing home deaths when New York state followed President Trump's CDC and CMS directives. More than a dozen states, both Democrats and Republicans, followed the same directives. Or, as one of those state leaders, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said, 'This is a federal directive. Everybody was doing it,'” Azzopardi said.
