12 September 2021: Op-Ed - When Celebrity Obscures Suffering

When celebrity obscures suffering

Brendan Williams' op-ed in McKnight's Long-Term Care News strikes resonant notes addressing the ethical and moral corruption enabling Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals. Click through to read the whole thing, we're only going to feature excerpts of the opening and ending paragraphs. Here's the opening:

There is a poignant scene in the first episode of Spike Lee’s “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½” on HBO in which New York Assembly Member Ron Kim breaks down recounting the efforts of former Governor Andrew Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, to bully him into silence over nursing home deaths from COVID-19.

The scale of those deaths was concealed by Cuomo’s administration and they were exacerbated by Cuomo’s much-maligned March 2020 directive to nursing homes to admit COVID-positive hospital discharges, totaling more than 4,500 residents according to an Associated Press calculation. Kim’s uncle was among nursing home residents who died.

Here's the conclusion:

There is an expression in the law, res ipsa loquitur, that is Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.” It is where something is so obvious as to offer proof of negligence. No reasonable person can deny that Cuomo’s decision to compel nursing homes to admit those positive for COVID-19 contributed to the suffering, and likely deaths, of other nursing home residents.

And yet that did not stop the accolades for a man who was cutting nursing home care funding just two months before facilities were subject to the federal government’s COVID-19 restrictions.

In looking back, perhaps it is as Rabbi Shai Held presciently warned in The Atlantic in a March 12, 2020 piece entitled “The Staggering, Heartless Cruelty Toward the Elderly.” As he wrote:

‘The elderly’ are bunched together as a faceless mass, all of them considered culprits and thus effectively deserving of the suffering the pandemic will inflict upon them. Lost entirely is the fact that the elderly are individual human beings, each with a distinctive face and voice, each with hopes and dreams, memories and regrets, friendships and marriages, loves lost and loves sustained. But they deserve to die — and as for us, we can just go about our business.

The rabbi's words underscore the scope and scale of moral and ethical corruption within the Cuomo administration. Less than two weeks after they were published, the Cuomo administration implemented its deadly 25 March 2020 directive. The inevitable tragedy it fostered soon followed.