Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) will testify in a Sept. 10 hearing before the House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, panel Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) announced Tuesday.
The hearing is set to focus on the guidance Cuomo issued in the early days of the pandemic that led to New York nursing homes and long-term care facilities admitting patients who had tested positive for COVID-19.
“Andrew Cuomo owes answers to the 15,000 families who lost loved ones in New York’s nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. On September 10, Americans will have the opportunity to hear directly from the former governor about New York’s potentially fatal nursing home policies,” Wenstrup said in a statement.
Cuomo appeared for closed-door testimony before the panel earlier this year after receiving a subpoena.
Wenstrup charged that in that interview, Cuomo was “shockingly callous when pressed to explain discrepancies in nursing home death counts, repeatedly deflected responsibility for the nursing home directive, and most egregiously, showed little remorse for the thousands of lives lost.”
Cuomo’s appearance in the Sept. 10 hearing is voluntary.
“We hope that during his public hearing next week, Mr. Cuomo will stop dodging accountability and honestly answer the American people,” Wenstrup said.
Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi took aim at what he called a “farce of a committee” in a statement, pointing to a study in the National Institutes of Health library based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data that found New York “had a lower nursing home death rate pro rata than all but 11 states.”
“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 [former President] Trump’s CDC and CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services]. 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.
“They refuse to look in the mirror at their own anti-science policies that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths or call the one witness who is most relevant and was supposed to lead the entire effort: Donald Trump.”
Cuomo’s guidance said nursing homes could not turn away patients who tested positive for COVID-19 as long as they were medically stable, and prohibited requiring those hospitalized to be tested for COVID-19 before admission or readmission to nursing homes. Azzopardi said the state maintained preexisting safeguards that said nursing homes should only accept patients they can care for.
The policy was intended to alleviate overburdened hospitals, but critics have pointed to it as a major factor in a high number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Cuomo resigned from office in 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations, which he denies.