Cuomo grilled by House panel over NY’s COVID nursing-home deaths: ‘Don’t see a lot of remorse’
A defiant former Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday blamed everyone but himself for New York’s deadly COVID nursing-home debacle while being grilled by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, GOP pols said.
“I don’t see a lot of remorse. He is deflecting,” said Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), who is one of several doctors serving on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic as it investigates the former governor’s conduct at the closed-door hearing.
Cuomo allegedly refused to shake the hand of House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik of New York at one point but was otherwise very cordial, sources and lawmakers said — and when asked by The Post how he was feeling heading into the session, replied, “Cool dude, loose mood, always.”
Republican lawmakers exiting the questioning said Cuomo was still trying to frame the congressional inquiry as political and did not provide any noteworthy new context to the panel, instead keeping to what he wrote in his related book, a gushing story of his administration’s response to the horrific crisis.
“New York was not collecting or analyzing any nursing home data, and then it was a rush to have the deaths done retroactively, which was tremendous pressure on the nursing homes at the same point in time, that they’re trying to care for people and continuing to admit people,” Miller-Meeks, who served from 2011 to 2014 as director of Iowa’s Department of Public Health, told reporters.
“There needs to be accountability.”
Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY), Cuomo’s 2018 gubernatorial challenger, said, “He’s keeping to what you’ve read about in his published book.
“There is no variation from that as of yet,” Molinaro told reporters in reference to Cuomo’s $5 million book deal.
But Molinaro, the former Dutchess County executive, said Cuomo was pleasant, noting that it was likely the first time they’ve spoken since the ex-governor called him to express his condolences after Molinaro’s father died from COVID-19 in 2020.
Still, sources told The Post that Cuomo snubbed Stefanik, who called for his arrest and resignation in August 2021 after an investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James found he had sexually harassed or mistreated 11 women.
Cuomo resigned three weeks later.
GOP members of the House COVID subcommittee focused some of their questioning on a March 25, 2020, “must admit” order that the Cuomo administration issued to send senior citizens with the coronavirus into nursing homes in the state.
The Republicans also zeroed in on state reports that show he did not fully report associated ensuing deaths.
In his opening statement, Cuomo had denied accusations of mishandling the COVID response and pointed to federal guidance as having hampered his administration’s response.
But under sharp questioning from Stefanik on Tuesday, Cuomo acknowledged that the order sending infected older people into the nursing homes was a state directive and not a federal mandate from the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a source familiar with the exchange told The Post.
Stefanik told reporters after the hearing that the governor had also labeled Democratic staff asking questions “conspiracy theorists,” “bizarre” and “obsessive.”
The ex-governor did at the end of the interview tell panel members that he was accountable for how New York handled COVID in nursing homes, she added.
Cuomo in a post-hearing gaggle with reporters, however, pointed to nursing home staff as the real vectors of viral infection that led to the excess deaths.
Cuomo placed partial blame on a professional staff member at the New York Department of Health for drafting it — but by the end of the marathon session told reporters it was the wrong decision.
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have told my Department of health, ‘Don’t listen to the federal government; they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ Because what the facts now show is you know what happened in nursing homes.”
“They [Cuomo and his then-staff] want to assert that that order is exactly the same as the federal CMS, which it is not,” Molinaro told reporters while the hearing was on a break. “The state order says, ‘You shall take back individuals and you cannot deny them solely on the basis of COVID,’ which left them no option but to accept individuals that we knew would cause risk to the other patients.
“Andrew Cuomo was attempting to shift blame for what was a clear directive,” Molinaro said. “When they identified and knew that the order was causing great loss, they subsequently cooked the books to suggest that the numbers of those who died in nursing homes were much less than we knew.”
In his opening statement, Cuomo also said data from the first year of the pandemic released by CMS shows New York ranked 39th for “pro rata nursing home deaths” — and pointed to subsequent federal investigations that had not found fault with New York’s nursing home directive.
He told lawmakers that those deaths were recorded even when occurring outside of nursing homes — and that at least a dozen states had similar policies that placed elderly, vulnerable patients in care facilities.
“Any legitimate review of what went on in nursing homes would start with the question of why a dozen states had nearly identical admissions policies all issued around the same time,” Cuomo said. “California’s guidance, for example, was nearly identical to New York’s.”
“If those policies were not based on federal guidance, why were they so similar?” he asked. “Where did they come from?”
The Justice Department declined to prosecute Cuomo after investigating the order, while independent reports from the New York Bar Association and Empire Center for Public Policy determined that it led to hundreds of additional deaths.
Another probe by James’ office revealed in January 2021 that the governor’s administration low-balled the nursing home death count by more than 50% — from 8,711 to over 13,000.
The 76-page report surveyed 62 nursing homes that found the state undercounted the fatalities there by an average of 56%.
More than 80,000 New Yorkers died of COVID-19 from the beginning of the pandemic to May 2023, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show.
Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s top aide, later apologized to Democratic lawmakers on a private phone call for withholding the data — but accused the Trump-era Justice Department of trying to use the information as “a giant political football.”
Cuomo has also harped on former President Donald Trump’s attacks during the pandemic against Democratic Govs. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
GOP panel members pointed out that the nursing home mandate was continued even when facilities such as the Javits Center in Manhattan and the US Navy Comfort hospital ship were scarcely used.
Cuomo said federal guidelines barred COVID patients from treatment on the ship — and prompted the nursing home order implemented by his administration.
“By the time they reversed themselves, New Yorkers had flattened the curve and fears of a hospital collapse were no longer at issue,” he said in his opening remarks of the ship.
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), another doctor on the panel, told reporters, “As an ER doctor myself who treated COVID patients during the pandemic, I think it’s despicable when government officials come in and say to doctors what they should and shouldn’t do.
“Why wouldn’t we test for COVID when we do every single admission, knowing that these patients will deteriorate if they had COVID?” McCormick added, pointing to documents obtained by the subcommittee that prohibited senior care facilities from testing.
“And why wouldn’t we not only test them but use a ship that’s designed for isolation?” he told reporters. “That’s my way. I’m a Navy retiree. … That’s what this ship was created for — it was sent up there for — and we didn’t use it. That’s egregious.”
The lead Democrat on the panel, Rep. Raul Ruiz, disagreed with Republicans and said the ex-governor was providing clear answers to all their questions.
“The governor is being very straightforward and he’s answering questions to the best of his ability,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) told reporters.
In a pre-recorded counter-programming video posted to YouTube while he testified, Cuomo doubled-down on his calling the investigation politically motivated, saying that victims of families that died in nursing homes were subscribing to “conspiracy theories.
“I believed at the time, all the accusations were obviously political and that there was no credibility, therefore I didn’t aggressively fight to bat them down every day,” Cuomo said in his rambling 23-minute video. “However, that allowed many families to believe the conspiracy theories about the blunders in the nursing homes causing death for their loved one.”
Republicans leaving the Tuesday interview pushed back on that notion.
“I mean, to say that this is a political investigation, there’s nothing political about this. Even people within his own party in New York, challenged him on the numbers of death,” Miller-Meeks said.
