2 April 2023: Three Years Later, No NY Leaders Held Accountable for COVID Deaths Following Deadly Directive

Three years on, NY leaders STILL not held to account for deadly COVID nursing-home order

After many weeks without any news related to New York's COVID nursing home deaths that followed Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens) has authored an op-ed decrying the lack of any meaningful probe by the state's political leaders. Here's an excerpt:

Wednesday marks 1,099 days since the Cuomo administration ordered COVID-positive nursing-home patients back into unprepared facilities.

The erasure of this fatal mandate from our state’s pandemic history is one of Albany’s most egregious and nauseating acts.

Families who lost loved ones meet this time of year with anger, frustration, hurt and disappointment. How could they not?

March is a slow-moving month of hell because their nearest and dearest were caught up in New York’s deadliest policy mistake and no one will acknowledge it.

That failure includes the elected leaders of the state legislature. Kim lays out why that's a very big problem:

Our Legislature has not made any serious attempts at accountability for the numerous mistakes in our pandemic response.

We don’t have clarity on how personal-protective-equipment contracts were handled, how testing was procured or who drafted the deadly March 25 order and why.

We could be months away from another pandemic, and I assure you, we are no closer to being ready for the next one.

How scientific information is handled is at the heart of this inquiry.

If our leaders were found to have made decisions based on politics, not science, there must be consequences.

And that's really the answer to the question of why New York's most powerful politicians haven't lifted a finger to probe the disaster of New York's COVID nursing home deaths, isn't it? They don't want to face the consequences. By doing nothing, they're really doing what it takes to make sure they aren't ever held accountable.