Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) will testify on the coronavirus pandemic in a hearing before the House Select Committee on Oversight and Accountability on Sept. 10, committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) announced Tuesday.
The hearing focuses on the guidelines Cuomo issued at the beginning of the pandemic that led to New York nursing homes and long-term care facilities admitting patients who had tested positive for Covid-19.
“Andrew Cuomo owes answers to the 15,000 families who have lost loved ones in New York City 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 deadly nursing home policies,” Wenstrup said in a statement.
Cuomo appeared before the panel earlier this year after receiving a subpoena to testify in private.
In that interview, Wenstrup accused Cuomo of being “appallingly callous when pressed to explain discrepancies in the number of nursing home deaths. He repeatedly denied responsibility for the nursing home policy and, most egregiously, showed little remorse for the thousands of lives lost.”
Cuomo’s appearance at the September 10 hearing is voluntary.
“We hope that at his public hearing next week, Mr. Cuomo will stop shirking his responsibilities and answer honestly to the American people,” Wenstrup said.
Cuomo’s spokesman Rich Azzopardi criticized in a statement what he called a “committee farce” and referred to a study in the library of the National Institutes of Health based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which found that New York “has a lower nursing home death rate than all but 11 other states.”
“This committee has continued to make false political attacks and blame New York for nursing home deaths, even though New York has followed the instructions of [former President] Trump’s CDC and CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services]. More than a dozen other states – Democratic and Republican – followed the same guidelines, or as one of those states’ politicians, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, put it, “Those were the federal guidelines. That’s what everyone did,” Azzopardi said.
“They refuse to look in the mirror and consider their own anti-science policies that have caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. They also refuse to call the most important witness who should be leading the entire operation: Donald Trump.”
Cuomo’s guidelines said nursing homes cannot turn away patients who test positive for COVID-19 as long as they are medically stable. It also banned requiring hospitalized patients to take a COVID-19 test before admission or readmission to nursing homes. Azzopardi said the state is maintaining safeguards already in place that say nursing homes can only admit patients they can care for.
This measure was intended to relieve pressure on overburdened hospitals, but critics point out that it is a major factor in the high number of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Cuomo resigned from office in 2021 amid allegations of sexual harassment, which he denies.
