27 October 2023: Cuomo Acknowledges Motive for Dumping COVID Patients Into Nursing Homes

Bill Maher confronts Cuomo on nursing home scandal, ex-NY gov calls questions 'Monday morning quarterbacking'

Andrew M. Cuomo, the resigned-in-disgrace former governor of New York, finally acknowledged the motive behind his deadly 25 March 2020 directive, which forced nursing homes in New York to accept COVID patients being discharged from hospitals without testing to verify if they might still be contagious. The following excerpt presents a discussion that occurred between HBO Real Time host Bill Maher and Cuomo on the topic on 27 October 2023.

During Friday's "Overtime" segment on YouTube, Maher read a viewer question posed to Cuomo asking whether he would have done anything differently during COVID.

"So you allowed people who had been in the hospital – older people, from a nursing home, now they go to the hospital to go back into the nursing home without testing them," Maher said. "ProPublica says you were the only state to do it without testing them when they went back into the nursing home. And that's what caused the death in the nursing homes. Is that true?

"No, the short answer is no." Cuomo responded. "First, this is Monday morning quarterbacking by which I could make the New York Jets champion, right, if we're gonna do this. When COVID started, it was – all of the disinformation was amazing, right? It was coming from China, wet market, zootrophic virus, it was going to California and the state of Washington so we banned travel to China, from China. It turned out that China had already spread it to Europe. All the European flights were coming to New York, JFK. So it had been here for months and it was astronomical. When we first found out about it… they were projecting we would need 150,000 hospital beds to deal with the number of infected, we only had 50,000 in the entire state of New York."

"You did it to free up beds," Maher said.

"We were afraid of losing hospital beds," Cuomo said, "but people who were in hospitals who were considered medically stable, who were tested, were sent to nursing homes if the nursing home said they could treat that person in a way that protects the other people in the nursing home. And that was a way to make sure we had enough hospital beds.

Here's a video excerpt of the interview:

The full interview also covers the sexual harassment allegations that were used to successfully force Cuomo to give up his powerful position as New York's state governor. That portion of the interview has drawn greater attention in the media.

This entry was entered into the timeline on 24 November 2023.