Governor Andrew Cuomo’s imperious bent has been in full view since the beginning of the corona pandemic. His outrageous targeting of religious institutions for special restrictions – with particular venom directed towards the Jewish community – was unceremoniously slapped down by several incredulous courts, including the United States Supreme Court.
Last April, in the midst of a temporary decrease in Covid-19 cases across New York State, he arrogantly declared: “The number is down because we brought the numbers down. G-d did not do that. Faith did not do that. A lot of pain and suffering did that. That’s how I works. It’s math.”
When it emerged that one of his plainly wrongheaded directives ordering nursing homes to admit coronavirus patients likely led to the deaths of many residents of nursing homes, he claimed incongruously both that his directive mirrored what the federal government mandated and also did not require the admissions.
Yet, not only has he yet to document his charge of the federal mandate and his directive mysteriously disappeared from the internet, he claimed that the directive permitted nursing homes to deny the admission of the corona infected.
But here is the directive in pertinent part:
No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [Nursing Home], solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVI-19 prior to admission or readmission.
Notice that nursing homes were not even able to ask referring hospitals whether a patient being referred even had the virus. At all events, as the number of nursing home coronavirus cases continued to mount at alarming rates and the complaints of nursing homes began to draw larger attention, Cuomo pushed back with an unusual reading of his directive. What it really meant to convey, he said, was that only if a nursing home is equipped to handle coronavirus patients does his directive kick in and force them to do so. If it is not so equipped, the nursing home has the recourse of transferring these patients to a facility that is equipped. Who decides whether a facility is adequately equipped, the governor didn’t say. And where he found the transfer recourse in the words “No resident shall be denied…” he also didn’t say.
About a month later, after sanctimoniously vowing to pursue serious penalties against nursing homes where there were Covid-19 deaths, Cuomo, perhaps not wanting to open a Pandora’s box, seemed to back away the day after 139 people had died in a NY hospital. Waxing rhetorical, he asked: “Who is accountable for the 139 deaths ? How do we get justice for those families that had 139 deaths? What is justice? Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Nobody. Mother Nature? G-d? Where did this virus come from? People are going to die by this virus. That is the truth. You can have a situation where everyone did the right thing, and everyone tried their best, and people still die.”
And just the other day, the Governor shockingly dismissed the scathing findings of an investigation by the New York Attorney General Letitia James that the Cuomo administration had grossly underreported nursing home corona virus deaths by 50 percent. This came about, the report said, by virtue of the administration’s listing as hospital deaths, those corona patients transferred to the hospital from nursing homes. deaths.
Incredibly, after claiming that NY has the lowest number of nursing home deaths than any other state, the Governor said, “Who cares [where they died]? They died.”
But the James investigation may be the least of Governor Cuomo’s worries. The other day White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked at a White House briefing whether President Biden would support a federal investigation into what happened and Cuomo’s role following the release of the NY AG’s report? She responded that it would be up to the U.S. Department of Justice. Following up we learned that the Justice Department had asked for information on nursing home deaths as far back as last August from states that had issued directives to nursing homes as New York did.
Significantly, it appears that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would have jurisdiction to investigate the nursing home deaths under the federal “Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act which protects the civil rights of persons in state-run nursing homes, among others.
So stay tuned.