Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is set to testify next week before a House committee investigating the administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — including the infamous mandate that forced infected patients into nursing homes.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic announced on Tuesday that it is preparing to question the former New York governor on September 10 about the “unscientific guidance” that has led to the deaths of thousands of senior citizens.
“Andrew Cuomo owes it to the 15,000 families who lost loved ones in New York nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).
The COVID subcommittee had conducted a closed-door transcribed interview with Cuomo in June, during which the governor was “very surprised,” Wenstrup added.
During the seven-hour ordeal, subcommittee members expressed similar sentiments after pressing Cuomo about the March 25, 2020, “must admit” order, which placed COVID-positive patients in senior care facilities across the country.
“I don’t see much remorse,” Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), one of several doctors on the panel, told reporters during a break from testimony.
“He is adhering to what he has read in his published book,” said Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY), Cuomo’s 2018 gubernatorial challenger, was referring to a $5 million book deal the governor signed amid the pandemic. and which reflects his leadership in a shining manner.
As he attacked what he called the Trump Justice Department’s “nuclearization” investigation of the nursing home mandate, the 66-year-old former governor acknowledged that a member of his staff had made the order, but he still blamed the federal government. government to provide genuine guidance.
“If I knew now, I would tell 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 reality now shows you know what’s going on in the nursing home.”
Lawmakers quibbled with the characterization, pointing out that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a subagency of the US Health and Human Services, did not force anything, unlike the New York order.
In a May 2023 hearing before a select subcommittee, Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), a doctor and former chief medical officer for Sacramento County, also called the New York directive “medical malpractice.”
An independent report in 2021 from the New York Bar Association and the Empire Center for Public Policy determined that “must admit” orders for nursing homes caused hundreds of additional deaths.
The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James found in the same year that the governor’s administration reduced the number of deaths in nursing homes by more than 50%.
At 62 nursing home facilities across the country, Cuomo officials calculated the average number of COVID-19 fatalities to be 56.%the 76-page report shows.
Health Commissioner Howard Zucker later released the full internal data, which revised the number of COVID deaths from 8,711 to 12,743.
A top aide to Cuomo, Melissa DeRosa, who also sat for a transcribed interview with the House COVID panel, has privately admitted to Democratic state lawmakers that she initially withheld the data, in part out of fear of a Justice Department investigation.
In 2022, the New York comptroller confirmed that Cuomo’s health department had “misled the public” by leaving at least 4,100 deaths in nursing homes due to COVID-19 – and had “matched the presentation with the Executive’s narrative,” indicated Cuomo.
A more recent report in June 2024 from The Olson Group, a consulting firm, said Cuomo made a “significant and unnecessary mistake” when he ignored health department protocols established to deal with the pandemic and took initiatives away from local communities.
“If the state has used the plans that are available and written, then, yes, they will have the appropriate plans,” one official at the company said during the review. “But we’re stuck with all these executive orders.”
More than 84,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19 during the pandemic, data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows.
“Andrew Cuomo is trying to misrepresent what was a clear directive,” Molinaro told reporters in June during a break in the interview. “When they found out and realized that the order caused huge losses, they cooked up the book to suggest that the number of people who died in nursing homes was much lower than we knew.”
Although the transcript of the interview has not been released, the COVID subcommittee released readings showing Cuomo answering a direct question about the death toll at the nursing home.
“True leaders own their mistakes and take responsibility for their mistakes,” Wenstrup said in a statement Tuesday. “This is not what we saw from Mr. Cuomo during his tenure as governor or during the transcribed interview.”
“I hope that during next week’s public hearing,” he added, “Mr. Cuomo will stop avoiding accountability and answer honestly to the American people.
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi disparaged the COVID subcommittee and accused the panel of a “phony political attack.”
“From the beginning of the Republican MAGA has used this committee – chaired by a podiatrist and including President Trump’s personal doctor and a representative with a PhD in Q-Anon – for partisan attacks on people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who helped get this country through COVID,” Azzopardi said in a statement.
“This committee continues to engage in false political attacks that blame New York for nursing home deaths even though New York is following guidance from the CDC and Trump’s CMS. More than a dozen other states – Democrats and Republicans – are following the same guidance or as one of these state leaders, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said, ‘This is federal guidance. This is what everyone is doing,'” Azzopardi said.
