27 September 2021: Janice Dean Says Howard Zucker Should Go To Jail

Fox News Meteorologist who lost relatives in nursing homes says Zucker should "go to jail"

Since the news stream for Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals has slowed to follow the pace of legal developments and official press briefings, we're taking the opportunity to play catch up with a recent story the timeline originally skipped over. This report is from 23 September 2021:

Fox News Senior Meteorologist Janice Dean lost both her mother-in-law and father-in-law from COVID-19 in nursing homes downstate in 2020. Soon after, Dean went on a mission to get accountability, attending several rallies in Albany and around the state, demanding to know why Commissioner Zucker and then-Governor Andrew Cuomo created a policy that required nursing homes to take in patients who were known to be COVID-19 positive. That policy, implemented March 25th, 2020, is believed to have helped cause the spread that led to more than 15,000 deaths in nursing homes.

“Howard Zucker is just as guilty maybe even more guilty than Andrew Cuomo. He was the one who also allowed the friends and family COVID tests to happen. Essentially taking away all of these resources that could have gone to good use to help the nursing homes,” Dean said. “I would have liked it to be a firing just like I would have liked Cuomo to be impeached, I think Howard Zucker should be fired and he should probably go to jail too,” she continued.

With a federal investigation still active into Cuomo over what the New York State Attorney General found was an undercount of reported nursing home deaths during the pandemic, and an Assembly Judiciary Committee report into that data still pending, Dean believes that there will be more bombshells to come.

“I wonder if this resignation is preemptive to the investigation and to the impeachment report that is supposed to come out in the next couple of weeks,” Dean said.

It's not a bad speculation. When the sexual harassment allegations arose, it provided the majority Democratic Party in New York with a tool they could use to remove Andrew M. Cuomo from power while limiting political damage to members of their party within the state government that would have occurred had the COVID nursing home deaths scandal been the primary focus of the assembly's impeachment probe. That's because the COVID nursing home deaths scandal involved the active participation of many more members of the party than have so far been ousted following Cuomo's resignation in disgrace.

We have our doubts as to whether the NY Assembly's report on what it found during its impeachment probe will come out as soon as Dean anticipates, but that event when it does arrive will indicate how deeply the assembly's investigators pursued it. Our guess is "not very".

We anticipate a slow news period until the report is released. That may mean less-than-daily updates to the timeline.