As mass vaccinations bring the hell that has been the coronavirus pandemic to an end, it’s safe to say what was evident to anyone paying attention from the start: With the sole exception of the Chinese Communist Party, Andrew Cuomo handled the virus worse than any other governing entity on the planet.
But evidently, it was all a part of the plan.
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By the time the New York governor published his pandemic memoir American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, both the media and public health “experts” like Anthony Fauci deemed Cuomo the hero of the pandemic. Already lauded with an Emmy and widespread praise, Cuomo then earned $5.12 million for a book about the pandemic published while the worst was still yet to come.
If New York were a nation, its death rate per capita would be only outdone by Hungary and the Czech Republic. But given Cuomo’s early strategy to become a star, this seems like no accident.
Rather than lock down early and then protect New York’s most vulnerable, Cuomo was extraordinarily late in issuing a stay-at-home order and then failed to shut down the New York City subway system. Epidemiologists believe that some 50% to 90% of New York’s earliest deaths could have been prevented if he had issued a stay-at-home order just two weeks earlier, and economists found that the subway system became “the principal transmission vehicle” of the virus early on in the pandemic.
But most disastrous was his handling of the nursing homes, deaths from which wound up comprising around 30% of the state’s total death toll. Cuomo, whose campaigns have received significant funding from the nursing home lobby, mandated that nursing homes accept COVID-positive patients even though we all knew that the virus hits the elderly the hardest. Even more astounding than that, Cuomo refused to use the nearly empty Javits Center pop-up hospital or the USNS Comfort hospital ship provided by the Trump administration. Even though that would have safely cordoned off COVID-positive nursing home residents from the uninfected, Cuomo had the Javits Center hospital taken down and the Comfort ship sent back to the federal government even while the nursing home order stayed in place.
It was all marketing. By shuttering Javits and sending away the ship so prematurely, Cuomo was able to claim victory over the virus in public. In the meantime, we now know his administration was actively suppressing the release of the true nursing home death toll. Thanks to his public narrative, he secured public praise and then his book deal. All in all, his book, now under investigation because it may have been illegally ghostwritten by government employees on state time, netted more than $100 per copy sold.
Now, Cuomo is under siege from all fronts — not just for the nursing home scandal and cover-up but also for multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault. At least he has some blood money to keep him warm at night. Hopefully, it was worth it!
