Wednesday, March 31, 2021

31 March 2021: How the Timing of Governor Cuomo's Book Deal Fits into NY's COVID Nursing Home Deaths Scandal

As Cuomo Sought $4 Million Book Deal, Aides Hid Damaging Death Toll

None other than the New York Times has finally noticed what Team Cuomo members were doing while Governor Cuomo was scoring his book deal!

As the coronavirus subsided in New York last year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had begun pitching a book proposal that would center on his image as a hero of the pandemic. But by early last summer, both his book and image had hit a critical juncture.

Mr. Cuomo leaned on his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, for assistance. She attended video meetings with publishers, and helped him edit early drafts of the book. But there was also another, more pressing edit underway at the same time.

An impending Health Department report threatened to disclose a far higher number of nursing home deaths related to the coronavirus than the Cuomo administration had previously made public. Ms. DeRosa and other top aides expressed concern about the higher death toll, and, after their intervention, the number — which had appeared in the second sentence of the report — was removed from the final version.

At stake was not just the governor’s reputation, but also, potentially, a huge payoff: a book deal that ended with a high offer of more than $4 million, according to people with knowledge of the book’s bidding process.

Here's a sampling of previous coverage of Governor Cuomo's book deal from the timeline:

Governor Cuomo's book deal was announced on 18 August 2020. Here are some of the more notable events from the timeline during that month:

That last story was used as the excuse for the Cuomo administration's acknowledged coverup of the full extent of COVID nursing home resident deaths during the period its deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect.

But if you notice, the Cuomo administration had already been hiding the data for months, long before the Trump DOJ sought its data. In reality, Team Cuomo had been exploiting a loophole in reporting nursing home resident death data to the U.S. government as early as May 2020, which is how they were able to hide the full extent of these deaths.

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