Cuomo to testify before Congress about COVID-19 nursing home deaths

House Republicans announced on Tuesday that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo would testify before the Oversight Committee to address his state’s policy for requiring nursing homes to admit COVID-19 -positive patients in the early months of the pandemic.

“Andrew Cuomo owes answers to the 15,000 families who lost loved ones in New York’s nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. On September 10, Americans will have the opportunity to hear directly from the former governor about New York’s potentially fatal nursing home policies,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Cuomo, who resigned in late 2021, testified before a closed-door panel of the select subcommittee in June under a subpoena regarding the March 25, 2020, New York State Department of Health directive prohibiting nursing homes from denying admission to COVID-19-positive patients.

During the interview, Cuomo said he was unaware of the March 25 order, saying it originated from an “unknown staffer” at the state Department of Health. Cuomo maintained in the transcribed interview that he was only made aware of the policy in late April 2020.

Evidence from Cuomo’s impeachment hearing, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, found that the number of COVID-19 nursing home deaths as a result of the March 25 order could have been as high as 9,844. The impeachment inquiry also found that the state Department of Health significantly underreported the number of deaths.

Rich Azzopardi, spokesman for Cuomo, told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that “New York has been a prime political target” of the subcommittee, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci , the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director.

“This committee has continued to engage in false political attacks blaming New York for nursing home deaths despite the fact that New York was following guidance from Trump’s [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services],” Azzopardi said.

Azzopardi also highlighted that over a dozen other states, including ones governed by Democrats and Republicans, implemented similar must-admit policies during the first few months of the pandemic.

“They refuse to look in the mirror at their own anti-science policies that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths or call the one witness who is most relevant and was supposed to lead the entire effort: Donald Trump,” Azzopardi said.

Immediately after the transcribed interview in June, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), the only New York delegate on the select subcommittee, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview that it was “frustrating” that Cuomo would not take any responsibility for the policy four years after the events transpired.

Malliotakis was in the New York State Assembly during the early months of the pandemic. She told the Washington Examiner that she received numerous requests from her constituents at the time to investigate the policy.

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“Is it that the governor did not know what was going on in his own state?” Malliotakis said in June. “Everybody else knew about it, all the local legislators, all the state legislators. The nursing homes were complaining about it to our offices.”

“A true leader owns up to his mistakes and takes responsibility for wrongdoing. That is not what we saw from Mr. Cuomo during his term as governor nor during his transcribed interview,” Wenstrup said on Tuesday. We hope that during his public hearing next week, Mr. Cuomo will stop dodging accountability and honestly answer the American people.”