New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been celebrated by the left as one of the heroes of the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, he’s being accused of a massive coverup for a decision he made that may have led directly to the deaths of thousands of his own citizens.
And he’s blocking attempts to investigate the deadly mistake.
In March, as coronavirus ripped through New York, Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients.
What happened next was sadly predictable: The coronavirus tore through care facilities, including homes that had no cases at all prior to Cuomo’s fateful order.
But Cuomo and his team claimed the nearly 6,500 deaths in nursing homes in his state had nothing to do with his order.
Heading towards a critical general election, Democrats are trying to sweep the incident under the rug. Cuomo refuses to take any blame himself.
Instead, they’re blaming the staff – they’re blaming healthcare workers, the heroes of the pandemic – for bringing the virus into the facilities in a report that even the experts claim is full of holes.
Epidemiologist Catherine Troisi told The Associated Press last month the state’s report was hampered by a lack of data from dozens of nursing homes that had zero cases before being forced to accept sick patients.
“Would this get published in an academic journal?” she wondered aloud, before answering her own question: “No.”
“I don’t think this report convincingly demonstrates that the policy was not another important driver of deaths,” CUNY epidemiologist Denis Nash told ProPublica.
People have questions about the report.
But Cuomo is trying to make sure they’re never answered. Asked this past week if he would allow an investigation into the nursing home deaths, he claimed it would be too “political.”
“I wouldn’t do an investigation whether or not it’s political, everybody can make that decision for themselves,” Cuomo said. “I think you’d have to be blind to realize it’s not political.”
Cuomo has a long history of politically motivated decisions to stop and start investigations.
He’s worked with and egged on the state’s attorney general, who has launched endless investigations into President Donald Trump and is leading an effort to essentially dissolve the NRA.
A few years ago, Cuomo infamously created a panel to investigate political corruption – but when that investigation got close to him, he pulled the plug.
When the panel issued a subpoena to an advertising firm that had Cuomo among its clients, one of the governor’s aides called them to put a stop to it. Then, a New York Times investigation found his aides “repeatedly pressured the commission on where to direct its energies” and that his office “interfered with the commission when it was looking into groups that were politically close to him, and had a heavy hand in the writing and editing of the only report the commission ever issued.”
The move led to a federal investigation.
It ultimately found no evidence of a federal crime, but it left open plenty of questions about Cuomo, his ethics, his conduct and his priorities.
Yet he’s now calling an attempt to investigate one of his own decisions over life and death matters “political.”
And he’s doing to coronavirus questions what he did the ethics investigation.
He’s trying to shut it down – but he’s going to have a hard time doing that as his actions have caught the attention of Republicans in Congress.
Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., minority leader of a House subcommittee on coronavirus, last month called the Cuomo report a “disgusting” attempt to deflect blame.
“NYSDOH’s report appears to be little more than your administration’s latest attempt to deflect criticism and shift blame for the consequences of your deadly nursing home order,” he wrote to Cuomo. “But blame-shifting, name-calling and half baked data manipulations will not make the facts or the questions they raise go away. The families of those affected by your March 25 order deserve answers about why it was put in place and, rest assured, we will not give up until we get those answers.”
And someone even more important to his future than Congress is looking for answers: the people of New York.
Or as columnist Karol Markowicz wrote for The Spectator US, “Sooner or later Cuomo will have to answer for what he did.”
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”