Gov. Andrew Cuomo spent months hiding his state’s true COVID-19 nursing home death toll from the public, according to a new report.
The New York Democrat’s most senior aides spent five months overruling state officials, including Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, who attempted to release death tallies to the public or state lawmakers, according to interviews and documents shared with the New York Times.
Among the documents that were not released were a scientific paper mentioning the data and two letters drafted by the state’s Department of Health addressed to state legislators, according to the report.
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Elkin Abramowitz, legal counsel for the governor’s office, dismissed the “brouhaha” of the report as “overblown.”
“There are cynical suggestions offered for the plain and simple truth that the chamber wanted only to release accurate information that they believed was totally unassailable,” he said in an email to the Washington Examiner.
Abramowitz said the chamber responded to the Department of Justice request with “what they deemed to be totally accurate numbers,” and Cuomo “was interested in putting out only accurate information to highlight the contrast between Albany and Washington.”
“What’s going on in the press now is exactly what the chamber wanted to avoid while William Barr was [attorney general],” he added.
The governor is under federal investigation for his handling of nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic after Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa acknowledged that Cuomo’s office hid the state’s nursing home death toll out of concerns of political retribution from former President Donald Trump. Despite Beth Garvey, a special counsel and adviser to the governor, claiming in March of this year that nursing home death tolls couldn’t be “verified,” a document released weeks ago showed the Cuomo administration was tracking COVID-19 nursing home deaths since at least April 2020.
A report conducted by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a government watchdog group, found a March 25, 2020, executive order signed by Cuomo shielding nursing homes from liability when admitting COVID-19-positive patients was linked to over 1,000 additional resident deaths. Cuomo reversed the nursing home policy on May 10, 2020.
In addition to questions surrounding his handling of nursing home data, the governor is facing several other scandals that threaten his governorship. He faces accusations of directing state health officials to give special COVID-19 testing access to members of his inner circle, which Richard Azzopardi, a senior adviser to the governor, rejected as an “insincere effort to rewrite the past” in an email to the Washington Examiner.
Cuomo has also been accused of sexual harassment by 10 women, claims that have led to separate investigations by Attorney General Letitia James, as well as an “impeachment investigation” in the New York state Assembly. The governor, who has repeatedly rejected charges of inappropriate touching, earlier this week denied accusations of inappropriate behavior toward women.
“I have never touched anyone inappropriately,” he said during a press conference on Tuesday.
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Despite mounting pressure from within his party to step aside, Cuomo, who is eligible to seek a fourth term in office in 2022, has vowed not to resign, saying that the allegations of impropriety against him are false.
Representatives for Zucker did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner’s requests for comment.
