17 August 2021: Cuomo Acts Eight Months Too Late to Mandate Nursing Home Staffs Get COVID Vaccines

Cuomo mandates all New York hospital, nursing home staff be vaccinated

Andrew M. Cuomo's announced resignation as NY governor is supposed to take effect on 24 August 2021. In a rather bizarre move, he's acting some 8-9 months after COVID vaccines started being distributed in New York to mandate nursing home staffs be vaccinated.

All of New York State’s 450,000 health care workers in hospitals and nursing and other settings are required to get the coronavirus vaccine by Sept. 27 to help curb the spread of the COVID delta strain, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday.

The order issued by the state Health Department covers staffers at privately run and public hospitals, nursing homes and other elder care facilities and congregate settings....

The order acknowledges what The Post has reported in recent months: that an unacceptably high rate of medical workers remain unvaccinated at hospitals and nursing homes.

About 75 percent of the state’s 450,000 hospital workers have completed their vaccination series — in most cases getting two doses.

That means one of every four hospital workers is unvaccinated.

Meanwhile, just 68 percent of the state’s 145,500 nursing home workers — serving frail, elderly residents most susceptible to contracting COVID – got jabbed.

That means one of every three nursing home staffers is unvaccinated.

What makes Cuomo's action interesting is the 6 July 2020 report by New York's Department of Health, which blamed nursing home staff members for spreading COVID in NY nursing homes during the period when the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect.

If Cuomo really believed that was true, and if he really cared about the risk of exposing elderly nursing home residents to COVID, he wouldn't have waited 8-9 months after vaccines became available to fix the problem he claimed caused so many elderly New Yorkers to be exposed to COVID.

Instead, he waited until eight days before his last day in office to impose the mandate. Doing it at such a late date means it was never true, and he never really cared.