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Two new reports reveal that Andrew Cuomo’s adminisAration altered reports on the true number of deceased seniors in nursing homes to hide the high mortality rate, a situation that confirms the statements of Melisa DeRosa, who confessed that the New York governor lied with premeditation.
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) it was the governor’s top aides who pressured state health officials to amend a public report that reflected that Cuomo’s March 25th order had serious consequences and increased deaths of deceased seniors.
There was a controversial directive from Cuomo’s Health Department informing nursing homes that they could not refuse to admit patients who tested positive for COVID-19.
According to the WSJ the initial figure in the report said that nearly 10,000 nursing home residents had died in New York through June alone; and the altered number was 6,432; meaning that the administration wanted to conceal some 3,500 deaths.
Also, a New York Times article reported that Cuomo’s top aides rewrote the report on the pandemic’s progress through June to conceal that more than 9,000 people had died in nursing homes in the state.
Both articles not only confirm the statements of the Governor’s aide Melissa DeRosa, but also coincide with information from State Attorney General Letitia James who claimed that the Cuomo Administration “underestimated” the true numbers.
The NYT asserts that there are documents showing that Cuomo was publicly under-reporting geriatric deaths by 50% from the state Department of Health during the early months of the pandemic.
After the truth came out, the Governor went so far as to justify his actions by assuring that he did so to prevent then-President Donald Trump from using them to launch politically motivated attacks against him; he also said that he had delayed providing official information to Congress because he was in the middle of a federal investigation.
In response to the new WSJ story, Beth Garvey, Cuomo’s special and senior advisor, said in a statement that “data on deaths outside nursing homes were omitted after the Department of Health could not confirm that they had been adequately verified.”
Now that it is known that the Cuomo Administration pressured health officials, one wonders if this led to mass resignations at the Department of Health.
In early February, it became known that at least nine top state health officials left the department, resigned or retired in recent months.
“The New York State Department of Health’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Health resigned in late summer. Shortly thereafter, the Director of its Office of Communicable Disease Control also resigned. So did the Medical Director of Epidemiology. Last month, the State Epidemiologist said he would also leave,” the NYT pointed out.
Cuomo’s policies might have caused the death of more than 1,000 seniors
A study by the nonprofit Empire Center for Public Policy revealed that the governor’s order issued on March 25, 2020 would have caused “several hundred and possibly more than 1,000” deaths.
The Empire Center for Public Policy report also suggests that the controversial March 25th mandate is “associated” with more than one in six of the 5,780 nursing deaths statewide between late March and early May.
The Albany-based panel said it reached its conclusions by comparing death rates in facilities that admitted COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals with rates in others that did not, and then processed the figures to “a 99 percent statistical confidence level.”
The study found that nursing homes outside New York City and its suburbs were most affected by the order, and each that accepted COVID-19 patients averaged 9.3 more deaths than those that did not.
On February 18th, it was learned that the FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are investigating the New York Governor’s task force for knowingly lying about the true number of elderly nursing home deaths.
In addition, both Democrat and Republican lawmakers are accusing Cuomo of committing an “intentional criminal offense”.
Lawmakers accuse Cuomo of obstruction of justice by withholding information about the number of elderly nursing home deaths in an attempt to evade a U.S. Department of Justice investigation.
Sabrina Martín Rondon is a Venezuelan journalist. Her source is politics and economics. She is a specialist in corporate communications and is committed to the task of dismantling the supposed benefits of socialism // Sabrina Martín Rondon es periodista venezolana. Su fuente es la política y economía. Es especialista en comunicaciones corporativas y se ha comprometido con la tarea de desmontar las supuestas bondades del socialismo