25 March 2021: Janice Dean Marks Anniversary of Cuomo's Deadly Directive

Families deserve justice one year after Cuomo’s deadly nursing home order

Here's an extended excerpt from Dean's op-ed:

Today, March 25, marks the one-year anniversary of Cuomo’s reckless mandate that ordered over 9,000 COVID-positive patients into nursing homes. It was in effect for 46 days before his Health Department finally reversed it and then scrubbed it from their Web site.

I believe it helped kill thousands of our family members during the pandemic and although I cannot prove it, I think it contributed to the deaths of my husband’s parents Michael “Mickey” and Dolores “Dee” Newman.

I never set out to be an advocate on behalf of my in-laws. But when I kept seeing the governor on television last summer and fall being celebrated and never even being asked the nursing- home questions we so desperately wanted the answers to, I decided to tell our story.

I did it to raise awareness about this New York tragedy. More than 15,000 seniors are dead and our governor tried to cover up the numbers and blamed everyone else for his mistake. Why wasn’t this one of the biggest headlines in history?

And now, a year later, the governor and his handling of COVID nursing-home deaths is finally being investigated. There is a federal and FBI investigation being conducted in New York. They are circling around Cuomo and his top aides.

People have asked me if I feel some satisfaction in knowing that Cuomo might finally be convicted for his crimes, but I’m not sure if he will ever truly be held accountable. And we’ll never get my husband’s parents Mickey and Dee back.

That Governor Cuomo and members of his administration might never be held criminally accountable for their intentional negligence is itself a scandal.