Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is set to testify next week before a House committee investigating his administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — including an infamous mandate that forced infected patients into nursing homes.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic announced Tuesday that it was preparing to question the ex-New York governor on Sept. 10 about the “unscientific guidance” that led to the deaths of thousands of senior citizens.
“Andrew Cuomo owes answers to the 15,000 families who lost loved ones in New York’s nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).
The COVID subcommittee has already conducted a closed-door transcribed interview with Cuomo in June, during which the governor came across as “shockingly callous,” Wenstrup added.
During the seven-hour ordeal, subcommittee members expressed similar impressions after pressing Cuomo about a March 25, 2020, “must admit” order that placed the COVID-positive patients in senior care facilities statewide.
“I don’t see a lot of remorse,” Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), one of several doctors on the panel, told reporters during a break from the testimony.
“He’s keeping to what you’ve read about in his published book,” quipped Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY), Cuomo’s 2018 gubernatorial challenger, in reference to the $5 million book deal that the governor inked in the middle of the pandemic and that depicted his leadership in glowing terms.
While he attacked what he called a “nuclearized” probe by the Trump Justice Department of the nursing-home mandate, the 66-year-old ex-governor acknowledged that a member of his staff had drafted the order, but he still blamed the federal government for providing the original guidance.
“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,’” Cuomo told reporters. “Because what the facts now show is you know what happened in nursing homes.”
Lawmakers quibbled with that characterization, pointing out that the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a subagency of US Health and Human Services, did not compel anything, unlike New York’s order.
In a May 2023 hearing before the select subcommittee, Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), a doctor and former chief medical officer for Sacramento County, had also called the New York directive “medical malpractice.”
Independent reports in 2021 from the New York Bar Association and Empire Center for Public Policy determined that the “must admit” order for nursing homes led to hundreds of additional deaths.
New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office found that same year that the governor’s administration low-balled the nursing home death count by more than 50%.
In 62 nursing home facilities statewide, Cuomo officials undercounted COVID-19 fatalities by an average of 56%, the 76-page report shows.
Health Commissioner Howard Zucker subsequently released the full internal data, which shifted the COVID death count 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, had acknowledged privately to Democratic state lawmakers that they initially withheld the data, in part due to the fear of a Justice Department probe.
In 2022, New York’s comptroller confirmed that Cuomo’s health department had “misled the public” by leaving out at least 4,100 nursing home deaths due to COVID-19 — and had “conformed its presentation to the Executive’s narrative,” referring to Cuomo.
A more recent report in June 2024 from The Olson Group, a consulting firm, said Cuomo made an “a significant and unnecessary mistake” when he ignored established health department protocols set up to address the pandemics and took the initiative away from local communities.
“If the state had used the plans that were available and written, then, yes, they would have had the proper plans in place,” one official told the firm during its review. “But instead we were stuck with all these executive orders.”
More than 84,000 New Yorkers died of COVID-19 during the pandemic, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show.
“Andrew Cuomo was attempting to shift blame for what was a clear directive,” Molinaro told reporters in June during a break in the interview. “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.”
Though the interview transcript has yet to be released, the COVID subcommittee put out a readout that showed Cuomo brushing off direct questions about the deflated nursing home death count.
“A true leader owns up to his mistakes and takes responsibility for wrongdoing,” Wenstrup said in his Tuesday statement. “That is not what we saw from Mr. Cuomo during his term as governor nor during his transcribed interview.”
“We hope that during his public hearing next week,” he added, “Mr. Cuomo will stop dodging accountability and honestly answer the American people.”
Cuomo’s spokesperson Rich Azzopardi derided the COVID subcommittee and accused the panel of engaging in “false political attacks.”
“From the very beginning MAGA Republicans have used this farce of a committee – headed by a foot doctor and includes President Trump’s personal physician 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 has continued to engage in false political attacks blaming New York for nursing home deaths despite the fact that New York was following guidance from Trump’s CDC and CMS. More than a dozen other states – Democratic and Republican – followed the same guidance or as one of those state’s leaders, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, put it, ‘This was federal guidance. This was what everyone was doing,” Azzopardi said.
