Congress is set to grill former New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo (D) on Tuesday about his administration’s controversial directive to send more than 9,000 coronavirus-infected people back into nursing homes in the earliest days of the pandemic and other decisions he made that drew national scrutiny.
The hearing, coming more than four years after the order was issued and more than three years after Cuomo resigned as governor amid a cascade of sexual harassment complaints, arrives as many Americans have shifted their focus away from a virus that once dominated daily life. But Democrats in Congress have repeatedly joined Republicans to insist that Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic deserves scrutiny, with lawmakers asking why Cuomo’s administration balked at releasing accurate data on nursing home deaths and whether his family received preferential access to limited coronavirus tests.
In an interview, the congressman leading Tuesday’s hearing said it would provide a measure of accountability after New York’s order sparked a public health and political crisis.
“Our basic, point one, of the committee is do an after-action review and see what the lessons learned are,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who chairs the House panel dedicated to investigating the nation’s coronavirus response. “Mistakes were made.”
A report issued Monday by the panel’s Republicans also concluded that Cuomo and his aides worked to influence a New York health department report that shifted blame for the nursing home deaths away from the Cuomo administration’s order.
Ahead of the hearing, Cuomo defended his actions as decisions made amid an unprecedented public health emergency and has blamed the ongoing scrutiny on political rivals. Tuesday’s hearing comes hours before a scheduled prime-time presidential debate where former president Donald Trump, a Cuomo foe, may be asked about his own failures in responding to the coronavirus.
“Remember what this [inquiry] is for the Republicans: an election-year block-and-tackle operation to protect Donald Trump and deflect from his leadership failures throughout COVID,” Cuomo wrote in a Daily Beast op-ed published Monday.
The March 2020 order by Cuomo’s administration – issued as New York reeled from the nation’s first surge of coronavirus, and intended to preserve hospital capacity – forced the state’s nursing homes to readmit residents who had developed covid, exposing many facilities’ older and often vulnerable residents to a deadly disease months before vaccines and treatments became available.
The decision has been linked to the deaths of at least hundreds and potentially thousands of people, according to outside experts and analysts. Those experts and some officials have acknowledged there was no need to force nursing homes to house coronavirus-infected patients given ample emergency capacity elsewhere in New York City, the outbreak’s epicenter in March 2020, and across the state. A pair of temporary hospitals, including a Navy hospital ship, went mostly unused.
Cuomo and his aides have repeatedly been unable to specify who wrote the nursing home order, which came to haunt the New York governor after he received national praise, a book deal and even an Emmy award for his televised coronavirus briefings early in the pandemic. (Cuomo later lost the Emmy after the sexual harassment allegations.) Families of nursing home residents swiftly demanded answers, and Cuomo rescinded the directive six weeks after it was issued amid public criticism. Advocates planning to attend Tuesday’s hearing say they remain unsatisfied by the former governor’s disclosures.
“I would really like to know who influenced that directive. Because it was not based on science,” said Janice Dean, a Fox News meteorologist whose father-in-law died of covid in a New York nursing home.
The state’s attorney general in January 2021 issued a report concluding that Cuomo’s administration had significantly undercounted nursing home deaths in its public data. In a conversation with state lawmakers the following month, a Cuomo aide blamed some of the administration’s transparency problems on pressure from the Trump administration.
“He has been squirming about it visibly from the moment it became public news and … he rarely speaks about it with honesty,” said Bill Hammond, senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy, a New York think tank that sued the state to release nursing home data. Hammond on Monday night posted an analysis of the documents obtained by the House panel, concluding that they show new evidence of patient harms.
While Hammond and others have called for a holistic examination of Cuomo’s actions, many experts and even some members of Congress said they are bracing for Tuesday’s hearing to descend into political grandstanding.
Cuomo will face the same lawmakers who grilled Anthony S. Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in an often chaotic hearing this summer that shed little new light on Fauci’s role in the nation’s coronavirus response. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) mocked Fauci and said she did not believe he was worthy of being called “doctor” in one widely shared clip.
Cuomo and his aides have telegraphed their own plan to be combative with the House panel, dismissing it in op-eds and statements as a “MAGA Covid panel” led by a “foot doctor.” (Wenstrup is a podiatric surgeon.)
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), the panel’s top Democrat, made a preemptive plea that participants use Tuesday’s hearing to focus on lessons learned, rather than dwell on political fights. Family members of people who died of covid in New York nursing homes are expected to attend Tuesday’s hearing.
“I’m hoping that because of the amount of pain and suffering that family members have experienced due to the loss of their loved ones, that everybody … handles this hearing with the respect that they deserve,” Ruiz said in an interview Monday night.
Meanwhile, Cuomo has tried to link his nursing home policy to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, and other Democratic governors who also encouraged nursing homes to readmit patients positive for the coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic. Hammond said the policies were significantly different, with New York going further than other states in requiring nursing homes to accept such patients, rather than the more flexible approach adopted by Minnesota that allowed nursing homes to turn away infected people.
The panel has spent more than a year examining New York’s nursing home policy, first in a May 2023 hearing with outside experts and then in transcribed interviews with Cuomo and his aides behind closed doors. The interview transcripts were posted on Monday.
Congressional Democrats have said they were shocked by the Cuomo administration’s order, given older Americans’ vulnerability to the virus.
“It wasn’t rocket science” to keep sick patients out of nursing homes, said Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), a physician, at last year’s hearing. “Sometimes bad decisions are made. But we have got to try to understand why those decisions were made.”
(c) Washington Post
Who can guess why “Cuomo” is wearing his mask on his chin?
Who can guess why “Cuomo” is wearing his mask on his chin?
Covering up the fake Cuomo.
Because masks and social distancing was only for the dumb stupid gullible sheeple, never for the elitist pigs.
Och un vei for those who didn’t wear their masks or standing too close to someone, even though they knew the virus-turned-disease was a lie.