OAN Staff Abril Elfi
11:25 AM – Tuesday, September 2, 2024
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is set to testify before Congress regarding his nursing home advisory during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Cuomo is set to testify before members of the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on September 10th.
“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,” Representative Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio.) said in a statement Tuesday morning.
On Monday, a spokesperson for Cuomo stated that he had agreed to testify next week.
“The one question that needs to be answered is still being ignored: ‘Why did more people die from COVID in the United States than any other country and how do we make sure it never happens again?’ It is Governor Cuomo’s pleasure to join the committee once again to try to get an answer,” said Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s spokesperson.
In a series of tweets on Tuesday morning, the committee detailed takeaways from Cuomo’s previous interview in June.
The panel said he was “shockingly callous when discussing New York’s nursing home mortality rate” and that he “repeatedly deflected responsibility for issuing the nursing home directive.”
The committee had also conducted interviews with nine high-ranking former Cuomo administration officials.
They continued, describing the transcripts in detail from every interview conducted, including one with Cuomo himself, which will be released ahead of the hearing.
In 2021, Attorney General Letitia James (D-N.Y.) claimed that the New York State Department of Health “undercounted Covid-19 deaths” among residents of nursing homes by approximately 50%, which she claimed was discovered during an internal investigation. She claimed that this was because the patients were being transferred to other hospitals and proper protocols were not in place.
Nevertheless, many nurses during that time also told reporters that if an elderly patient tested positive for the virus, even if they died after a heart attack or other natural causes, then the cause of death included COVID-19 in many cases.
Following James’s investigation, an audit by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli in 2022 came to the conclusion that Cuomo’s health department failed to report roughly 4,100 deaths between April of 2020 and February of 2021. However, Cuomo has argued that his advisory was consistent with guidance from the Centers for Medicare and Medical Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Wenstrup stated in April that lawmakers wanted to question Cuomo further about the March 2020 advisory that banned nursing homes from rejecting patients solely on the basis of a COVID-19 diagnosis.
“I’m trying to learn why he would do something like this,” Wenstrup said. “As a doctor who has treated infections, it goes against all medical common sense to take someone who was highly contagious and put them amongst the most vulnerable.”
Cuomo had been first elected as governor in 2010 and served almost three full terms until he resigned in August of 2021. Even though he still denies the allegations, his resignation came following a report by James’s office, which found that he sexually harassed at least 11 women.
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