Andrew Cuomo to testify before Congress on COVID-19 nursing home policy
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will be required to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives over his government's policy of placing coronavirus patients into nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, announced Tuesday that Cuomo is scheduled to testify before Congress on Sept. 10.
Cuomo previously spoke with the Select Subcommittee in June for a recorded interview held behind closed doors that lasted approximately seven hours.
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"Cuomo owes answers to the 15,000 families who lost loved ones in New York's nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic," stated Wenstrup. "Americans will have the opportunity to hear directly from the former governor about New York's potentially fatal nursing home policies."
Wenstrup contends that "Cuomo was shockingly callous" during the June interview when he was "pressed to explain discrepancies in nursing home death counts." The former governor "repeatedly deflected responsibility for the nursing home directive, and most egregiously, showed little remorse for the thousands of lives lost."
"We hope that during his public hearing next week, Mr. Cuomo will stop dodging accountability and honestly answer the American people," Wenstrup added.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for Cuomo, denounced the "farce of a committee" and cited a study claiming that 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 Donald] Trump's CDC and [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services]," stated Azzopardi, as quoted by The Hill.
"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."
In March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic started to spread globally, the Cuomo administration sent about 9,000 recovering COVID-19 patients to hundreds of nursing homes in New York.
While the move sought to alleviate the burden facing hospitals, it was widely criticized for putting elderly New York residents in danger. Critics blamed the policy for causing thousands of deaths.
In February 2021, The Associated Press reported that as many as 15,000 nursing home residents in New York died from COVID-19 during the time period that Cuomo's directive was in effect.
Cuomo gained more scrutiny when reports surfaced that his administration covered up the actual number of documented COVID-19 related deaths in New York nursing homes.
Former Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa admitted during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders at the time that the administration was covering up the actual death toll due to the nursing home directive, The New York Post reported.
New York Office of the State Comptroller released an audit in 2022 that found Cuomo’s Department of Health understated COVID-19 death tolls at nursing homes by over 4,000 deaths.
In April 2022, Daniel Arbeeny, whose 89-year-old father died in April 2020 after developing COVID-19 symptoms at a nursing home in Brooklyn, filed a class-action lawsuit against Cuomo, DeRosa and former New York State Commissioner of Health Howard A. Zucker.
