COVID subcommittee accuses Cuomo of ‘wrongdoing’ in investigation report

The GOP-controlled House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday published findings from its investigation into former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, alleging evidence of the governor’s office deliberately seeking to conceal the extent of nursing home deaths due to the virus.

The results of the investigation come just one day before Cuomo is set to testify before the subcommittee.

Critics of Cuomo have accused him of issuing a directive early on in the pandemic — on March 25 — that compelled nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients directly from hospitals. Cuomo has consistently defended his actionsduring the pandemic, arguing that other governors issued similar directives and that they were all following federal guidance.

However, the memorandum from House investigators alleges that Cuomo issued the directive for nursing homes despite knowing it would increase the risk of transmission. Cuomo and former staffers of his administration provided over 50 hours of testimony to the subcommittee for its probe.

“The Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19. Today’s memo holds Mr. Cuomo and his team accountable for their failures and provides the most detailed and comprehensive accounting of New York’s pandemic-era wrongdoing,” said subcommittee chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).

In their testimonies, Cuomo and former Commissioner of the New York State Department of Health Howard Zucker both reiterated that the directive was issued in line with guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) as well as the Centers for DIsease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Guidance issued in mid-March of 2020 by CMS, shortly before Cuomo gave his directive, stated that nursing homes could still accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 “as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions. If a nursing home cannot, it must wait until these precautions are discontinued.”

The subcommittee, however, cited 2021 testimony from Deborah Birx, who served as coronavirus response coordinator under the Trump administration, in which she said the New York state directive violated CMS guidance.

The report pointed the differences in the CMS guidance and Cuomo’s directive, noting the non-binding language that CMS employed such as “can” and “should” while the New York guidance used commanding words like “must” and “prohibit.”

Cuomo acknowledged in his testimony to the subcommittee that the decision to terminate the directive less than two months later was influenced by public pressure.

The former governor said he halted the directive “because the public relations after April 20 had made the public so nervous and so concerned, anyone who had family in a nursing home was agitated and frightened.”

An independent report commissioned by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) looking into New York’s COVID-19 response found that while the “novelty” of the COVID-19 pandemic explained part of what happened in New York nursing homes, there were systemic, pre-pandemic issues that resulted in “avoidable response failings.”

The New York report also noted that among the state’s nursing facilities “overall outcomes were not substantially inconsistent with overall performance in such facilities nationwide.” But it criticized Cuomo’s decision to center the state’s response within the executive office, bypassing structures built in response to past emergencies, and said the admission of COVID patients into nursing homes created a “small secondary medical surge.”

“Every one of these patients was still recovering from a life-threatening illness requiring more care than normal, and each of these patients represented an infection risk to all the other patients, requiring the facility to figure out isolation, quarantine, and distancing in a finite space,” it said.

The state-commissioned report also criticized New York’s reporting on nursing home deaths as “lacking in transparency.” In his testimony to the subcommittee, Cuomo said the pandemic data reporting from his administration “could not have been more transparent.”

“I’ll say to you what I said to your Democratic colleagues. 6,500 in facility, 2,500 out of facility. So what? Well, you were trying to make the number look lower so you didn’t add the out-of-facility. There is no difference between 6,500 or 6,500 plus 2,500,” Cuomo told the House investigators.

Representatives for Cuomo criticized the subcommittee’s staff memorandum as being full of “cherry picked testimony & conclusions not supported by reality.”

“After wasting millions of taxpayer dollars with federal and state investigations that found no evidence of wrongdoing, this MAGA Congressional Committee came up short on verifying the Big Lie they’ve been peddling for years,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said in a statement.

“Its report does not conclude there was any causality between the March 25th DOH guidance and deaths in nursing homes. Nor does the report provide any evidence to support the claim of ‘mandatory’ nursing home admissions – an allegation previously refuted by the New York State Attorney General.”

“This MAGA caucus report is all smoke and mirrors designed to continue to distract from Trump’s failed pandemic leadership and is predictably sloppy, half baked partisan screed built upon uncorroborated, cherry picked testimony and conclusions not supported by evidence or reality,” he added.