6 July 2022: Replacement NY Governor Hochul Slow Walking Promised Probe of Cuomo's COVID Response

Hochul Moves Ahead Slowly on Promised Review of New York's Pandemic Response

It hasn't been our imagination. One reason for the lack of news on Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals has been identified. Replacement NY Governor Kathy Hochul isn't pulling her weight by following up her promise to probe the Cuomo administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic in New York. The following excerpt points to a failure of leadership:

Governor Kathy Hochul has yet to hire independent consultants, or even solicit contract bids, for a COVID-19 after-action review the administration said in April was already "underway.”

After having said in March that she told her team to do a full investigation of the state’s pandemic response, in May Hochul said the state would be working with independent consultants to conduct the investigation. Mark Johnson, a spokesperson for State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, said no contracts or requests for proposals (RFP) – the first step in the public bidding process – had come to the comptroller’s office. "We are not aware of any contracts or RFP’s related to this," he wrote in a June 28 email to Gotham Gazette.

A spokesperson for Hochul confirmed no RFPs had been issued for the review, which according to the governor's public comments would examine "every aspect" of the state's response to the pandemic....

And it's not for lack of calls being made by public health and government watchdog groups:

Public health experts and transparency advocates have been calling on the state to initiate a public investigation that would examine and report findings on the details of the state's handling of the pandemic, including many of the opaque decisions made by Governor Andrew Cuomo and other state officials behind closed doors and with limited public oversight. That could include anything from the March 2020 emergency order to shut down much of public life to policies around nursing home residents to the rollout of vaccines – many aspects of which have been strongly criticized.

At this point, we suspect Hochul has calculated moving forward on a genuinely independent probe would disadvantage members of her political party in November 2022's elections. That's because of the role of many of those officials in enabling Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID-related scandals, from his "friends and family special COVID testing" through the backroom agreements that permitted Cuomo to dump COVID patients out of NY hospital into nursing homes to free up hospital bed space without testing to verify they were no longer contagious.

That latter scandal led to hundreds, if not thousands, of excess deaths from COVID among New York's nursing home residents, the people known to be the most at risk of dying from COVID at the time Cuomo's deadly directive was implemented. All the officials who participated in that scheme have yet to be held accountable for their actions.