New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo’s and his Health Commissioner, Howard Zucker, are facing mounting, angry and now even bi-partisan calls for a federal investigation into their March 25 Covid-19 edict, in which recovering Covid-19 hospital patients were transferred INTO New York State’s (NYS’s) nursing homes.
This same policy REQUIRED that hospital patients remain UNTESTED before transfer into one of Zucker’s DOH-licensed nursing homes.
After prolonged, outraged public pressure the NYSDOH was finally forced to admit it had actually implemented this inconceivable action. We now know, from the NYSDOH itself, that Zucker allowed 6,326 untested, recovering Covid-19 hospital patients to be moved INTO NY’s nursing homes for forty-six consecutive days. That’s at an average of 137 patients per day. What do you think happened? This utterly insane – and many of the grieving families say criminal – public policy likely resulted in the deaths thousands of New York frail and disabled senior citizen nursing home residents.
NY’s numbers represent a large undercount due to the DOH leaving out the number of nursing home residents who later died in the hospital. AP estimates that at least 11,000 nursing home residents have actually died in NYS. President Trump, a former New Yorker, is now even aware of Cuomo’s attempts to cover-up the true number of senior citizen deaths in NYS which his Covid-19 policies caused. The president tweeted out about Cuomo:
Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York has the worst record on death and China Virus. 11,000 people alone died in Nursing Homes because of his incompetence!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2020
As the deaths mounted, so did the lies and cover-ups.
At August 3 hearings about this March 25 edict and nursing home fatalities, conducted by the Democrat-controlled NYS legislature, Health Commissioner Zucker testified. Legislators were frustrated and angry that he absolutely refused to provide the number of Covid-19 nursing home residents who subsequently died in a NY hospital. Zucker’s excuse? He needed more time to gather “absolutely accurate” information. Yet, to date, more than one month later, Zucker has still not produced this data.
At the end of this hearing, Senator Thomas O’Mara, (R,C,IP) representing rural central New York and the ranking member of the Senate’s Investigations and Government Operations Committee, blasted the testimony of Commissioner Zucker. O’Mara stated the man showed up ill-prepared, with “an implausible response that they don’t have any figures … which has been probably the biggest topic of concern that has been in the media and the public arena surrounding the governor’s March 24th [sic] order that nursing homes accept Covid-positive patients.”
O’Mara, like Betsy McCaughey, pointed out the fact of a cover-up by this administration, stating “the testimony from the Health Commissioner Howard Zucker … consisted of little more than his own self-serving, CYA PowerPoint presentation.” At hearings convened two weeks later, on August 17, this time by the Republican minority conferences of the NYS Legislature and focused on families’ testimony, Senator O’Mara doggedly pursued this same topic and finally got an answer from a forthright county official.
With NYS having sixty-two counties, it would be a simple matter to ask each county public health director to provide this data for that county. Why then is Commissioner Zucker, with his deceptive “self-serving, CYA” answers, refusing to give this information to the public? A well-oiled cover-up strategy of Cuomo’s has been to hide, withhold or delay information, such as the secretive March 25 edict, his virtually identical April 7 and April 10 edicts, or this nursing home-to-hospital death toll data. Another has been to repeatedly blame anybody and everybody else for his administration’s actions. We’ve all been stunned as Cuomo kept coming up with yet another person or entity to foist his failures upon, each attack more outrageous than the last.
Finally, on July 20, Zucker’s Department of Health issued a report, a secret re-issue of its July 6 report, crafting the most inhumane way possible yet, that any politician has ever cooked up to shift blame. With “Bad data,” these reports outrageously attempted to prove that it wasn’t Zucker’s March 25 edict which resulted in mass nursing home senior citizen casualties, it was asymptomatic staff and “visitation” –the families themselves! – who all spread the virus and caused the deaths of their own loved ones! EMBED: “July 20”
Ever the hardcore, selfish, power-hungry political animal, Gov. Cuomo along with Health Commissioner Zucker clearly, do not care at all about the thousands of families left in mourning. They are ignoring the families who STILL have loved ones in these nursing homes, many who haven’t been allowed to see their family member since Zucker’s nursing home lockdown on March 15!
The four Democrat governors have until Wednesday to respond to the DOJ’s letter. Given that the DOJ, citing the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA), is restricting the data it has requested to publicly-owned nursing homes only – and in NYS that represents only 30 nursing homes, the remaining 592 being privately-owned, corporate for-profit and nonprofit operations – its data demand is ignoring the majority of seniors who became infected and died.
This federal probe, if un-amended, will do almost nothing towards uncovering and documenting the elder abuses, the human rights’ violations, and the effect of these governors’ edicts which, like Cuomo’s March 25 policy, seemed to all result in mass disabled and frail elderly casualties within each of these four states’ nursing home congregate care systems.
