18 August 2021: Empire Center Releases Report "Like Fire Through Dry Grass"

‘Like fire through dry grass’

The nonpartisan, nonprofit Empire Center for Public Policy's Bill Hammond issued a new report on the center's investigation of Andrew M. Cuomo's and NY Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker's attempted cover-up of the full extent of COVID deaths among NY nursing home residents during the period their deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect. The report was released on 17 August 2021.

Click through the link above to see the Empire Center's new report. The following excerpt succinctly summarizes the independent group's analysis and findings as it relates to the misconduct of Cuomo administration officials:

The record shows that the governor and his aides:

• misstated how the March 25 directive worked and where it came from;
• omitted thousands of victims from official death counts;
• rewrote and falsified a Health Department report;
• knowingly disseminated skewed and misleading statistics;
• stonewalled legislative inquiries; and
• withheld public records in defiance of the Freedom of Information Law.

An array of high-ranking state officials participated in the cover-up, including several of the governor’s closest advisers, the health commissioner, the superintendent of financial services and a longtime aide later elevated to be SUNY chancellor.

As a result of their combined efforts, the true scale of the pandemic in New York’s nursing homes remained secret for months – until the attorney general’s office faulted the Cuomo administration for under-reporting and the Empire Center won a court order compelling release of complete data. The death toll in long-term care facilities turned out to be more than 6,000 higher than the state had acknowledged – a disparity shocking enough to make national headlines.

The original directive grew out of a moment of genuine crisis, when a deadly but poorly understood virus was spreading with fearsome speed.

Once the worst had passed, however, the governor and his aides had an opportunity to reassess their decision-making without the pressure of an emergency. They could have led an honest discussion of the decision they made – by describing the policy accurately, proactively sharing relevant data and engaging in good-faith debate to draw lessons for the future.

Instead, they led what amounted to a disinformation campaign – one that continues to cloud understanding of a major public health disaster.

We've highlighted "the health commissioner" in the text above because Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul has asked Howard Zucker, NY's health commissioner, to stay on the job despite his role in enabling Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandal and its attempted cover-up after she becomes New York's governor on 24 August 2021.

As for the report, the timeline's coverage of Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals overlaps and concurs with the Empire Center's analysis. We've presented our general overview of the scandals and their phases in the timeline's "Major Milestones" entry, which at this writing, covers the period from the beginning through through Andrew M. Cuomo's 10 August 2021 resignation announcement.