Report: Cuomo’s Top Advisors Changed COVID-19 Report on Nursing Home Death
“State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year…”
The Wall Street Journal revealed that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisors told state health officials to alter the report on the nursing home deaths caused by COVID-19.
In March 2020, Cuomo came under fire immediately when he issued an order that forced nursing homes to readmit residents who had COVID-19.
Now more evidence has emerged that Cuomo and his cronies worked overtime to cover-up his obvious mistake.
The July 2020 report only counted the people who died inside the nursing homes. It did not include the residents who died in hospitals after they got sick inside the homes.
Therefore, officials announced only 6,432 nursing home residents died even though the report first said: “nearly 10,000 nursing-home residents had died in New York by July last year.”
From WSJ:
The changes Mr. Cuomo’s aides and health officials made to the nursing-home report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, reveal that the state possessed a fuller accounting of out-of-facility nursing-home deaths as early as the summer. The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the data for another eight months.
State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year—counting both those who died in long-term-care facilities and those who died later in hospitals. That figure is about 50% higher than earlier official death tolls.
The typical PR responses have come out of the administration:
In response to questions from the Journal, administration officials said Thursday that Mr. Cuomo’s advisers advocated against including data on out-of-facility deaths because they had concerns about its accuracy.
“The out-of-facility data was omitted after DOH could not confirm it had been adequately verified,” Beth Garvey, a special counsel and senior adviser to Mr. Cuomo, said in a statement.
One official familiar with the back-and-forth between the Health Department and Mr. Cuomo’s advisers said state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker agreed the out-of-facility data shouldn’t be included in the report.
“[The Department of Health] was comfortable with the final report and believes fully in its conclusion that the primary driver that introduced Covid into the nursing homes was brought in by staff,” said Gary Holmes, a spokesman for the Health Department.
Those who pushed officials include:
- Cuomo’s secretary Melissa DeRosa
- Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker
- Advisor Jim Malatras (now works as chancellor of New York’s public college system)
- Linda Lacewell, superintendent of NY State Department of Financial Services
Eleanor Adams was the lead author of the report. She worked in the Health Department’s Metropolitan Area Regional Office in the area “that focuses on infection control in healthcare facilities.”
Adams is now one of Dr. Zucker’s top advisors.
The report included the deaths that occurred inside and outside of nursing homes:
The initial version of the report submitted to Mr. Cuomo’s team for review included both data on deaths of nursing-home residents in hospitals and deaths of residents inside nursing homes, people familiar with the report’s production said.
While health department officials agreed to remove that data, they resisted Cuomo aides’ requests to alter the report to play down the role of the March 25 directive in the spread of the virus, some of the people said.
The report as published concluded that the directive was “not a significant factor in nursing home fatalities.”
“Covid task force officials did not request that the report conclude the March 25 order played no role,” Ms. Garvey said in a statement. “Task force members, knowing the report needed to withstand rigorous public scrutiny were very cautious to not overstate the statistical analysis presented in the report. Overall, ensuring public confidence in the conclusion was the ultimate goal of DOH and the Covid task force in issuing the report.”
Cuomo and his administration consistently pushed back against claims that his March 2020 order caused unnecessary elderly deaths. To make matters worse, those people died without being able to say goodbye to family members.
The narrative crumbled in January after Attorney General Letitia James’s office discovered Cuomo’s policies probably killed more people than everyone originally thought, especially the March mandate.
DeRosa then admitted to Democrat lawmakers that they hid the nursing home data to avoid President Donald Trump’s attention.
In February, the Times Union reported that the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn launched an investigation into the nursing home deaths.
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Comments
Arrest those Neanderthals!
So he and his staff perpetrate fake news and he gets an Emmy award?
And rightly so. Hollywood doesn’t made its big bucks from non-fiction.
Oh no, no, no. That isn’t going to happen. Andy “Killer” Cuomo isn’t going to be given the out of, “I didn’t know what my “top advisors” were doing and I wouldn’t have given them permission to alter the reports if I knew.” excuse to get out of the fact that his incompetence killed thousands of elderly trapped in elder care facilities is he? Is he?!?
Well, we’ll wait and see what transpires now.
Because it’s not as if there weren’t plenty of public figures on Cuomo’s *ss contemporaneously as this policy was playing out, asking, “Are you insane, man?”
“Now more evidence has emerged that Cuomo and his cronies worked overtime to cover-up his obvious mistake.”
“Mistakes were made.” Uh-huh. We’ve heard that one before.
It was all a big mistake. Cuomo et al would never dream of trying to juice the death counts to blind people with panic.
15,000 dead is one hell of a mistake. Trying to cover it up was an even bigger mistake.
What percentage were Jews? Jews need to wake up and dump Dems.
But the important question is:
did any of the dead grannies ever feel sexually harassed by Cuomo?
Remember all those people who were supposed to be doing contact tracing?
Wasn’t there a bunch of money handed out to hire those people.
Where are those people, where is that money?
Contact tracing was based on “science” remember? The same people who tell us masks work also said contact tracing could be used to limit the spread.
Until COVID, masks (especially cloth) were useless against airborne viral transmissions due to the size. But magically and “scientifically” although COVID is the same size as the other airborne viruses, is the only one that apparently can’t travel w/out being attached to larger particles. The other airborne viruses which come from the same place, travel the same way, and infiltrate your body the same way do not need the larger airborne particles.
If you don’t believe that, you are anti-science.
“The narrative crumbled in January after Attorney General Letitia James’s office discovered Cuomo’s policies probably killed more people than everyone originally thought, especially the March mandate.”
Ok – anyone else think the self-serving spin of James “discovering” this is BS? You can bet your overtaxed dollars that she – and other NY Communists – knew about this from the beginning. I think this is a case of the Khmer Rouge wing of the Communist Party (James, AOC, Omar, etc) making their opening moves to bring down the Soviet Central Committee (Cuomo, Pelosi, Biden*) by picking them off one at a time.
Our gal Letitia was preoccupied at the time. Seems she had discovered that NRA had been defrauding its members by misappropriating their dues money, and was determined to recompense those members by destroying the entire organization and swallowing all their dues money.
She’s from the government, you know.
“Cuomo’s secretary Melissa DeRosa
Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker
Advisor Jim Malatras (now works as chancellor of New York’s public college system)
Linda Lacewell, superintendent of NY State Department of Financial Services
Eleanor Adams was the lead author of the report.”
None of these people had the integrity to refuse?
Sure, it would have cost them something. But all of them seem well-positioned to obtain employment elsewhere.
Perhaps one shouldn’t be cancelled for cowardice, but if one cannot trust such highly trained and -placed people to do the right thing, then just what value do they offer who ultimately pays for (and sometimes trusts) their expertise?
Why would anyone ever trust anything you say or do in the future? Did none of these people consider the personal and professional cost of compromising their integrity to serve someone’s political needs?
Why should we expect courage of high officials when we go out of our way to excuse it of low officials (see yesterday’s Baltimore school article)?
If you think it’s all about whether you will be employable afterwards, consider the current plight of Trump administration officials who performed their jobs honorably and creditably, without managing to kill or molest anybody?
So, what is the reason for the Democrat response to the Cuomo nursing home order? Did they suddenly discover compassion? Or is it all a calculated political move to cover-up the larger hoax justifying the responses to COVID?
The justification for the responses taken to combat the spread of COVId-19 are like quicksand. They look solid ground, until you walk out on them, then you sink, as they are without support.
The number of deaths actually attributable to COVID has plummeted, according to the CDC, [which set the reporting standards to begin with], to about 6% of those publicly attributed to the virus [500,000 to 30,000 in the US]. There is no statistical evidence that lock downs or mask wearing reduced serious illnesses from exposure to the virus. The economic fallout is still being tallied, but shows a highly disturbing trend in the reduction of small business re-openings. Evidence of damage to children, due to unnecessary school closures, is mounting. And, the populace is beginning to show widespread anger over the actions taken by their elected officials.
So, when it became apparent that the poster child for draconian COVID restrictions, Cuomo, fudged the nursing home death toll, they decided to get ahead of the story and investigate him and his office. But, it would still not serv their purposes if the scandal dragged out too long in public. People might begin to look hard at other Democrat governors. So, when Cuomo would not step down, we see the political #MeToo attacks begin.
But, it is all CYA for the Establishment.
Government always lies. Just look at the violations of law committed under the covid scam, mortgages don’t have to be paid, rent is no longer required, utilities are ‘on the house’, school teachers must be paid their full salary… because.
Election fraud with active malice, impeachment as action of vexatious litigants/complainants and a congress that has, as its only purpose, the destruction of democracy.
Don’t be fooled. Criminal Cuomo can survive a #MeToo onslaught. Surviving corruption charges and negligent homicide is harder. He would rather take his chances ignoring the women he harassed. I prefer he and his corrupt fellow governors that put covid patients in nursing homes face justice.
Anyone want to take bets on if 15k is actually the over/under line?
If so, who’s taking the under?
When criminals aren’t punished we get a lot more of them. Time to fix that.