Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will testify publicly on Tuesday before a congressional subcommittee critical of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic as it began spreading through the state’s nursing homes in 2020.
Members of the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report ahead of Cuomo’s testimony accusing the Democrat of orchestrating a “cover-up” to hide mistakes that endangered nursing home residents.
“The Cuomo administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19,” U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the Ohio Republican who chairs the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, said in a statement Monday.
Cuomo’s spokesman accused the commission of wasting taxpayer money on an investigation that found “no evidence of wrongdoing.”
“This MAGA caucus report is all smoke and mirrors designed to continue to distract from Trump’s failed leadership on the pandemic,” said Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi, calling it a “sloppy, half-baked partisan tirade constructed from uncorroborated, cherry-picked testimony and conclusions unsupported by evidence or reality.”
Cuomo resigned in August 2021 amid allegations of sexual harassment, which he denies.
Cuomo was widely seen as a reassuring figure in the early months of the pandemic, but his reputation took a hit after revelations emerged that his administration had published an incomplete accounting of deaths in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
Critics also point to a March 2020 guideline that initially prohibited nursing homes from turning away patients solely because they had had COVID-19.
The measure was enacted to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients who were no longer sick enough to be hospitalized but who needed nursing home care for other conditions and could not simply be discharged or sent home.
More than 9,000 recovering COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals and transferred to nursing homes under the directive, which was withdrawn after speculation it had accelerated outbreaks.
There have been about 15,000 COVID-19 deaths among long-term care residents in New York, far more than the number initially reported.
The congressional committee said it found that Cuomo and his top aides approved the directive and later tried to deflect blame by commissioning an unscientific report concluding that the withdrawn March directive likely had little effect on deaths.
As part of the investigation, former top officials from the Cuomo administration were interviewed.
Cuomo testified before the subcommittee in June, but it was behind closed doors.
Cuomo fired the subcommittee, writing in the Daily Beast on Monday that it sought to distract from former President Donald Trump’s leadership failures during the pandemic, saying it “continues to politicize COVID instead of learning from it.”
“The GOP strategy was, and continues to be, to concoct theories to blame the states and governors for the COVID deaths,” he wrote.
A state report commissioned by Cuomo’s successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and released this summer found that while policies on how nursing homes should handle COVID-19 were “rushed and uncoordinated,” they were based on the best understanding of the science at the time.
