20 February 2021: Cuomo Accused of Corruption in Gifting Legal Immunity to Nursing Homes For COVID Deaths

Andrew Cuomo Caved to Donors As He Shielded Nursing Home Bosses, Ron Kim Says

This interview with New York Assemblyman Ron Kim focuses on the role that immunity from prosecution for negligence that Governor Cuomo delivered to his campaign contributors from the nursing home industry may have played in contributing to the spread of COVID-19 within New York's nursing homes. Here's a key excerpt of the Q&A:

In April, Governor Cuomo put a provision into the state budget that granted legal immunity to all health care facilities, including nursing homes, and including the executives of those facilities. How did the corporate immunity order affect the situation, and how does it connect to the Cuomo administration underreporting nursing-home data?

Up to 9,000 COVID patients were being sent to nursing homes. And the nursing homes were telling the administration—which now the AG's report shows—that we can't take these people in. Like, "Half of our staff got COVID, they're out. We don't have enough staff, we don't have the PPE." And at that moment, Cuomo decided to give them legal immunity. That was their solution to that crisis, to the industry asking to be included in broad legal immunity.

They decided to protect the business interests of those who should have done everything possible, spent every dollar, to save people's lives. But the moment they got the legal immunity, it was clear that they felt like they didn't have to invest anymore in PPE, or hire more staff members. They completely shut down. They had a license to kill. That's what the immunity was.

The problems that nursing homes were having in obtaining personal protective equipment (PPE) were well known at the time Governor Cuomo opted to provide legal immunity for the nursing home industry on 20 April 2020 via the Emergency Disaster Treatment Protection Act (EDTPA). You can find out more of that history in this entry for 3 May 2020. If you check the entry for 20 April 2020, you'll find that Governor Cuomo was claiming he didn't know coronavirus-infected patients were being transferred from New York's hospitals to nursing homes to free up bed space.