(TheLastPatriotNews.com) – A congressional panel found that former New York governor Andrew Cuomo was guilty of personally editing a government report that downplayed thousands of COVID deaths linked to his March 2020 order.
This order forced nursing homes to accept patients infected with the coronavirus.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said in a memo that the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) released a report in July 2020, blaming nursing homes for the virus’s spread. Still, it was edited under the guidance of Cuomo’s administration.
Representative Brad Wenstrup, chairman of the subcommittee, said:
“The Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19. Today’s memo holds Mr. Cuomo and his team accountable for their failures and provides the most detailed and comprehensive accounting of New York’s pandemic-era wrongdoing.”
The findings were based on over half a million documents and more than 50 hours of sworn testimony.
Moreover, top Cuomo officials were involved in creating the report, including Jim Malatras, a Cuomo adviser who testified that Cuomo reviewed and edited the document multiple times. Malatras’ testimony aligns with an impeachment report submitted to New York’s assembly in 2021.
Malatras stated that Cuomo relayed his edits through aides and handwritten notes, though Cuomo himself denied being part of the report’s creation despite evidence showing otherwise.
In June 2020, amid increasing public scrutiny, Cuomo sent one of his assistants to order his team to draft the report.
His controversial nursing-home directive, which required facilities to admit COVID-19-positive patients from hospitals to ease hospital capacity, had led to over 9,000 COVID-19 patients being sent into nursing homes.
Cuomo’s assistant, Stephanie Benson, called the directive the “great debacle in the history books” in an email and urged aides to “[g]et a report on the facts” to protect Cuomo’s reputation.
In turn, Malatras testified that Benson’s email was seen as an order from Cuomo. The health department had initially been gathering data for a peer-reviewed study, but that process was abandoned to rush out the report.
Dr. Eleanor Adams, a former NYSDOH official, testified that the department did not independently write the report and that it was not peer-reviewed.
Additionally, the report deliberately left out data on nursing home residents who died outside of the facilities, creating a misleading death toll. Up until May 2020, those deaths had been included in the tally.
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