June 12, 2024
From Cuomo Spokesman Rich Azzopardi
Governor Cuomo Releases Opening Statement to the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
‘Today, any serious review must stop asking political questions and start asking fact-based ones. We can and we must learn from the tragedy of COVID.’
‘The factual picture today is much different than the accusations made four years ago. According to data from the CMS, by the end of 2020 – the year that the infamous DOH admissions guidance was in effect for six weeks – New York was number 39 in terms of pro rata nursing home deaths – this despite New York being ground zero for COVID.’
‘Any legitimate review of what went on in nursing homes would start with the question of why a dozen states had nearly identical admissions policies all issued around the same time.
Why is it that despite both red and blue states issuing these guidelines, only four states –all democratic — were investigated by Trump’s DOJ? Any legitimate review based on fact finding would have had, by definition, to look at all of the states, even if that inconveniently included ones that traditionally vote Republican in presidential elections.’
Andrew M. Cuomo, the 56th Governor of the State of New York, later today will be providing testimony to the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. His opening statement, as prepared for the record, is below.
Thank you for the invitation today – in a strange way it is my pleasure to be here. Four years after COVID, the investigations have concluded and the results are in.
And after much political distortion, the people of this great nation deserve to know the real, fact based answers: why did more Americans die during COVID than any other country on the globe? What went wrong here and how do we make sure it doesn’t happen next time?
A major question was why the nation had so many deaths in nursing homes.
To distract from their own culpability and muddy the waters, four years ago the Republican administration made many accusations and called for investigations into New York’s COVID response: those investigations have been completed.
The Department of Justice – three times –the Manhattan District Attorney, the New York Attorney General, and the New York State Assembly all investigated and not a single one validated the republican administration’s accusation that New York’s nursing home admissions guidance was the cause of COVID being introduced into nursing homes.
There is no doubt that politics was at play four years ago: nearly a dozen states issued similar nursing home admissions guidance.
First, any legitimate review of what went on in nursing homes would start with the question of why a dozen states had nearly identical admissions policies all issued around the same time. California’s guidance, for example, was nearly identical to New York’s. If those policies were not based on federal guidance, why were they so similar? Where did they come from?
Second, why is it that despite both red and blue states issuing these guidelines, only four states –all democratic — were investigated by Trump’s DOJ? Any legitimate review based on fact finding would have had, by definition, to look at all of the states, even if that inconveniently included ones that traditionally vote Republican in presidential elections: Kentucky, Utah, Arizona, Indiana. Bizarrely, not only were these states not investigated, in some instances they were actually praised by the Department of Justice in their highly unusual press release announcing the DOJ’s investigation of the four democratic states.
I believe we can all agree that political weaponization of the Justice Department is a fundamental violation of our democratic principles and beliefs. It is unethical, illegal and an abuse of government power and resources. Ironically, I have heard President Trump make this case many times over the past few months. It’s wrong when Republicans do it, and it’s wrong when Democrats do it.
Indeed the factual picture today is much different than the accusations made four years ago.
According to data from the CMS, by the end of 2020 – the year that the infamous DOH admissions guidance was in effect for six weeks – New York was number 39 in terms of pro rata nursing home deaths – this despite New York being ground zero for COVID. The study that cites this data makes clear that the CMS data includes “deaths [which] are reported regardless of the location, so if a nursing home resident is moved to a hospital and dies there, the death is counted as a nursing home resident death.”
Today, any serious review must stop asking political questions and start asking fact-based ones. We can and we must learn from the tragedy of COVID.
So “what actually happened in our nursing homes?”
Nearly 21% of all deaths occurred in nursing homes during the first year and a half of the pandemic and for Americans 65+ the rate of death was 23 times higher for those in nursing homes, according to the NIH.
Four years ago, there were two theories put forth to answer the question. Now we know.
One theory, the Trump administration’s theory and the dominant republican theory, was nursing home mismanagement by governors caused the problem. Specifically, the Trump administration charged that, in New York, the March 25 admissions guidance issued by the New York Department of Health was allegedly the reason COVID entered the nursing homes.
New York was vilified and attacked for such ignorance and ridiculed for causing thousands of deaths. However, today we know that was never true. Investigations found that New York’s DOH March 25 guidance was consistent with the prior guidelines issued by the federal CMS and CDC on March 4, 9, 13th and 23rd.
And we now know in fact the accusations against New York and the other democratic states were knowingly false at the time.
Federal officials knew that the states followed federal COVID policies on how and when patients could return to nursing homes from hospitals, and under which circumstances.
The CMS March 9 policy directed nursing homes that they could keep COVID positive patients rather than sending them to a hospital.
The March 13 CMS policy reiterated that nursing homes could keep patients they knew were COVID positive and should accept a COVID positive patient discharged from a hospital.
The March 23 CDC guidance said COVID patients could be released to a nursing home -without a COVID test -after 7 days from diagnosis.
In fact, the New York State Attorney General – no friend of mine – issued a report that went so far as to verify that the New York State Department of Health’s much criticized and politicized March 25 admissions guidance was consistent with the prior guidelines already in place and issued by the federal CDC and CMS.
Her report unequivocally stated, “the March 25 guidance was consistent with the CMS guidance…It was also consistent with CDC Published Transmission-Based Precaution (T-BP) guidance, which was referred to in CMS’s March 4 guidance…”
It was in black-and-white in the CDC and CMS guidelines.
The medical theory was that the patients being released from hospitals were not infectious and discharges were conditioned on nursing homes having transmission based precautions in place.
The data further disproves the Republican theory. Many states that did not adopt CMS, CDC or state driven readmission policies from hospitals had higher death rates in nursing homes. Clearly there was another cause for COVID entering nursing homes.
However, assuming you believe your theory that COVID entered the nursing homes by patients coming from hospitals with deadly results, the policies you blame were set by the federal government.
Why would policies that you have called dangerous, stupid, reckless have been put in place? Why have you never repudiated them? Who was responsible? You will need to ask President Trump or his CDC and CMS officials or the White House personnel who supervised them. New York wasn’t alone in following them – a dozen other states relied on their guidance, too.
The data never supported your theory – it was a pure political ploy. There is a second fact-based alternative theory presented in New York State Department of Health’s July 6 2020 report.
The source of infection in nursing homes was staff members and visitors who unknowingly walked the virus into the front door of the facility every day for many months before we even knew COVID was here and continued to walk COVID into nursing homes for months until mandatory staff testing was available and in place.
Research showed that geographic areas with high COVID rates had nursing homes with high COVID rates and those with lower COVID rates had lower rates in their nursing homes. Staff members from the community were the unwitting source.
Remember the reality. Staff members left every evening, went out, socialized, met with their families, many got infected and returned to work the next day. It was inevitable. This wasn’t just the case in New York – it was the case nationally and throughout the world.
A model program in France actually identified staff as the source of the COVID spread early on and had staff quarantine within the facility.
But there was an aggravating factor: there were very limited tests available for months.
There is significant evidence that CDC was very slow in developing the test. In fact, CDC was very controlling of testing in the beginning of the pandemic and required states to send all samples to the CDC in Atlanta and wait days for results.
The federal government did not even allow states to test until March 2020, when we now know COVID had already infiltrated the United States as early as December 2019. It was then another political battle to get the CDC to allow private labs to do testing which didn’t happen until March. Why did it take so long? Was it pure bureaucracy, government incompetence or something else?
And while New York, which was more aggressive than most states in following the science, rapidly built up our testing capacity well beyond that of any other state, we did not have enough tests for the rate of our desired testing for nursing home staff until May. At that time we mandated twice weekly staff testing – and ironically, at the time, were criticized by nursing homes for demanding too much testing in their facilities.
That meant January, February, March, April, untested staff walked in the door every day. Many states could not test nursing home staff for many more months than New York.
The question arises: why did it take the federal government so long to develop a viral detection test? We are not talking about developing a vaccine, which is obviously more complicated. We are talking about developing a basic detection test.
Remember at the time President Trump was denying the reality of the COVID virus, as he himself admitted to journalist Bob Woodward. In January, February and March the president was minimizing COVID, saying “It’s just like a flu”. “When it gets warm, it will be gone like a miracle”. “It will be gone by Easter”. But months earlier, behind closed doors, he said in a taped recording, “This is deadly stuff,’ “It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu,” and “’I wanted to always play it down.’
We now know without question that the White House knew the truth early on: that COVID was a deadly disease and it wasn’t going away. Denying that truth slowed states’ ability to respond and killed people.
We also know that President Trump discouraged states from testing as the more tests were taken the higher the number of people proven infected which he thought was to his political disadvantage. How do we know? He said so publicly: Trump said,“I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down please.” The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that there was political interference with federal health officials. They said “in the aftermath of President Trump’s praise, political officials pressured the FDA to issue emergency approval for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for treatment of COVID-19 without strong science to back up these actions.”
The obvious resulting question is whether the delay in testing was coincidental with Trump’s policy denying the virus and opposing testing, or was it politically influenced? Was the delay misfeasance or malfeasance, federal government incompetence or federal government corruption.
Four years later, the American people deserve an answer to these questions. Why did the United States of America have the most deaths? Why did President Trump knowingly mislead Americans about the looming crisis ? What took so long to develop tests for nursing home workers? Why did politics rather than science drive important federal decisions on vaccines, masks and basic precautions causing tens of thousands more Americans to lose their lives, ironically mostly republican? How can the states be better prepared? What can governors do better next time?
And why were reckless accusations made which were known to be false, and why were politically motivated investigations initiated that caused pain to many innocent victims and actually added to the suffering of millions of Americans.
These are the questions that must now be answered truthfully, pragmatically and quickly, before the next pandemic hits, and the catastrophe is repeated.
