By Brendan J. Lyons
Albany Times Union

ALBANY — Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo testified before a congressional subcommittee Tuesday and pushed back on allegations that he and his top aides manipulated fatality data in 2020 to shift blame from a controversial directive that his critics have said caused thousands of nursing home deaths.

The partisan-tinged hearing, which for Cuomo was the culmination of a nearly yearlong investigation by the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, revealed little new information about the policy decisions of Cuomo’s administration during the pandemic. It also degenerated at times to fingerpointing as Cuomo and Democrats on the subcommittee blamed former President Donald J. Trump for any failures with the pandemic response, while Republicans chastised the former governor for failing to be accountable for his mistakes.

“It appears there’s to be no soul searching from you, governor. I’m sorry,” subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, told Cuomo at the end of the more than two-hour hearing. “No self-critique of what could have been done better and improved upon, just doubling down, blaming others. … This hearing was an opportunity to learn about our COVID-19 response and how we can improve future responses. … This is about trying to be better in the future.”

Several Democrats on the subcommittee also remarked that they are interested in using the investigation to improve future responses to pandemics and public health crises. But some reminded Cuomo that he was under oath — a reminder that their investigation had revealed instances of the governor or his aides giving inaccurate or conflicting testimony during earlier interviews.

“I want to make something abundantly clear, any public official who sought to obscure transparency or mislead the American people during the COVID-19 pandemic should answer to the American public regardless of political party, and that is why the former governor and members of his administration faced serious questions from both sides of the aisle about allegations that they misrepresented nursing home fatality data to evade public scrutiny during the closed door transcribed interviews that led up to this hearing,” Ruiz said.

The subcommittee’s investigation had focused on a March 25, 2020, directive that had been issued by the state Department of Health instructing New York’s more than 600 nursing homes to accept residents even if they had tested positive for COVID-19. Cuomo has defended that directive — although it was rescinded six weeks after it was issued — contending it followed federal guidance and that nursing facilities were not supposed to accept COVID-19 residents unless they could do so safely.

But his critics noted that the wording of New York’s guidance had included words such as “shall” and “must” that caused confusion and led many nursing home operators to believe they had no choice but to accept residents who were infected with the coronavirus. Many of those residents were individuals who were not considered sick enough to require hospitalization and were returned home — for many of them that was a nursing home.

U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Schuylerville, who sat on the panel Tuesday but is not a member of the subcommittee, noted that Cuomo’s assertions about his office not having a role in the drafting of the March 2020 directive were refuted by the testimony of Health Department officials. They included one of the people who had a direct role in writing the directive and who testified that the Executive Chamber had “absolutely” signed off on the guidance before it was issued.

After he was given six minutes to make an opening statement, Cuomo repeatedly cast blame at Trump. 

“How do you explain that the United States lost more people than China that has four times the population,” Cuomo said. “And we know why we lost, why this happened, because the president denied it for months. … He systematically failed to supply the states with critical medical equipment, and PPE, (and) he set off an interstate death match for medical supplies telling governors simply to ‘try getting it yourselves.’” But several subcommittee members noted that Cuomo’s administration had declined to send infected nursing home residents to the Javits Center in Manhattan, which had been transformed into a makeshift hospital, or to the Navy’s USNS Comfort medical ship, which Trump’s administration had dispatched to New York City to help augment overwhelmed hospitals and nursing facilities.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, noted that in April 2020 Cuomo had been interviewed by radio host Howard Stern and said at the time that “Trump has delivered for New York.”

“You then you talked about Trump sending the ship, the (USNS) Comfort ship,” Taylor Greene said. “Mind you, that the Comfort ship was sent to New York on March 30 of 2020, that was just a few days after you signed the directive to put COVID-19 patients into nursing homes on March 25 which led to murdering people’s parents, grandparents and great grandparents.” (Cuomo did not sign the directive but his name was listed on the masthead of the guidance.)

After he was sworn in Tuesday, Cuomo began his opening remarks apologizing “to the families of the victims here today and across the country. I am sorry for your loss, and I believe you are owed in an apology, because this country should have done better.”

The former governor’s assertion — that he was unaware of the directive that had been issued to ease pressure on New York hospitals as there were concerns they would become overwhelmed with patients — echoes public statements he made in April 2020, a month after it was issued, when he claimed during a news conference that he was not familiar with the advisory.

The 48-page report on the investigation released Monday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic outlined several instances in which Cuomo as well as some of his former top aides may have made false or misleading statements — during the pandemic or in their testimony to Congress — and also allegedly encouraged members of their administration to be untruthful.

The report also revealed testimony by former top aides to Cuomo who disputed his administration’s assertions that his office had no part in editing a controversial July 2020 report that had been attributed to the state Department of Health and sought to deflect blame for thousands of nursing home deaths from the March 2020 order — and instead shifting the responsibility to infected staff members.

“Good people went home, went out to a restaurant, got the bug, they brought it to work the next day,” Cuomo said Tuesday, reiterating the findings of the July 2020 report. “Every study says that, and that has nothing to do with hospital admissions or readmissions.”

Still, the subcommittee’s report includes testimony that confirmed the July 2020 report, which was on the letterhead of the state Department of Health, had largely been drafted by members of Cuomo’s office.

Dr. Eleanor Adams, an epidemiologist who had graduated from Harvard Medical School and served as a special adviser to former New York Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker, was a contributor of the Health Department’s July 2020 report. But when she testified before the subcommittee in April, Adams said that she did not consider herself or anyone else at the agency to be the true authors of the report.

“I consistently voiced that I didn’t think this should be a (Department of Health) report,” Adams testified. “I provided edits as directed and asked, but they were not all accepted. And I told Dr. Zucker that I did not think this should be labeled as a Department of Health report as presented.”

The Times Union reported exclusively in June 2021 that the origin of the March 2020 memo to nursing homes stemmed from an urgent late-night call to Health Department officials from a top administrator at a Newburgh hospital. He informed them a van had just dropped off more than 15 nursing home residents who had tested positive for COVID-19, and if more followed it could create a critical shortage of beds.

Read more on Cuomo’s testimony at timesunion.com