19 May 2021: Opinion - Cuomo Earned $102 per Book Sold During Cover-up

Andrew Cuomo earned $102 per book sold while he covered up his coronavirus crimes

This commentary by Tiana Lowe links Cuomo's public relations efforts to New York's disastrous COVID policies:

If New York were a nation, its death rate per capita would be only outdone by Hungary and the Czech Republic. But given Cuomo's early strategy to become a star, this seems like no accident.

Rather than lock down early and then protect New York's most vulnerable, Cuomo was extraordinarily late in issuing a stay-at-home order and then failed to shut down the New York City subway system. Epidemiologists believe that some 50% to 90% of New York's earliest deaths could have been prevented if he had issued a stay-at-home order just two weeks earlier, and economists found that the subway system became "the principal transmission vehicle" of the virus early on in the pandemic.

But most disastrous was his handling of the nursing homes, deaths from which wound up comprising around 30% of the state's total death toll. Cuomo, whose campaigns have received significant funding from the nursing home lobby, mandated that nursing homes accept COVID-positive patients even though we all knew that the virus hits the elderly the hardest. Even more astounding than that, Cuomo refused to use the nearly empty Javits Center pop-up hospital or the USNS Comfort hospital ship provided by the Trump administration. Even though that would have safely cordoned off COVID-positive nursing home residents from the uninfected, Cuomo had the Javits Center hospital taken down and the Comfort ship sent back to the federal government even while the nursing home order stayed in place.

It was all marketing. By shuttering Javits and sending away the ship so prematurely, Cuomo was able to claim victory over the virus in public. In the meantime, we now know his administration was actively suppressing the release of the true nursing home death toll. Thanks to his public narrative, he secured public praise and then his book deal. All in all, his book, now under investigation because it may have been illegally ghostwritten by government employees on state time, netted more than $100 per copy sold.

This kind of linkage is why New York's "Son of Sam" law is being discussed as a tool to provide justice for the victims of Cuomo's COVID policies, with the impact of the deadly 25 March 2020 directive at the top of the list.