28 July 2021: Cuomo "Chest Thumping" Distraction from Continuing Criminal Probes

Cuomo thumps chest as civil case ends but criminal probe ongoing

If this report is an indication, Andrew M. Cuomo is now being called out for making false or debunked statements in regular news coverage in media outlets with a left-of-center editorial bias, which appears in the fourth paragraph of the following excerpt:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo trumpeted New York's rate of nursing home coronavirus fatalities on Monday as he praised the U.S. Department of Justice for its decision not to pursue a civil investigation of New York and three other states whose governors had ordered the facilities to briefly accept infected residents who were discharged from hospitals at the height of the pandemic.

Casting the civil investigation as "political hyperbole," Cuomo's remarks come as his top aides have privately remarked that they believe a separate criminal investigation of the administration's nursing home policies and directives will also end with no charges.

"The political environment has gotten so toxic in this country. So toxic, so mean. It was an outrageous allegation," Cuomo said. "New York followed the (U.S. Centers for Disease Control) guidance. CDC is a federal agency that's supposed to know what they're talking about in terms of health. We followed the CDC guidance when it came to how we handled people in nursing homes and when they went to a hospital, when they were brought back to a nursing home."

But that assertion by Cuomo has largely been debunked: The state's order did not include a directive — which the CDC's guidance did — that COVID-19 patients should only be returned to nursing homes last year in facilities that were able to safely care for and segregate those residents from others. The confusion exposed many residents and employees to COVID-19 because numerous nursing facilities interpreted the state's directive as mandating they take in those residents — and at many facilities the residents who were positive were in close proximity to others.

Independent, nonpartisan analysts estimate 1,000 or more excess deaths may have resulted from the Cuomo administration's neglectful failure to follow CDC guidance as described in this excerpt.

The article continues to round up reaction to the Biden-Harris administration's DOJ's decision to drop investigations of excess COVID deaths in states whose governors adopted measures similar to the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive.