12 June 2024: Cuomo Congressional Testimony on COVID Nursing Home Deaths: "Who Cares?"

Andrew Cuomo repeats infamous ‘who cares?’ on nursing home COVID deaths in congressional interview

While we're waiting for an official transcript of Andrew M. Cuomo's testimony before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, stories like this try to fill the gap, but are at risk of being unreliable. We're presenting this story to give a sense of what information made its way into the media. Here's the introduction:

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo repeated his infamous “who cares?” line during a grilling by a House committee Tuesday about his administration’s decision to send infected COVID-19 patients into nursing homes — resulting in thousands of deaths during the pandemic, according to a readout of his testimony released Wednesday by Republicans.

Republican majority staff from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said Cuomo “deflected responsibility” throughout the seven-hour interview about his administration’s devastating March 25, 2020, “must admit” order that shuttled sick patients into senior care facilities statewide.

A transcript of the testimony has yet to be released, and reps for Cuomo who were present for the interview have disputed some of the readout’s claims.

Here's the portion of the "readout" that contains the quote from this story's headline:

“The state order says, ‘You shall take back individuals and you cannot deny them solely on the basis of COVID,’ which left [nursing homes] no option but to accept individuals that we knew would cause risk to the other patients,” he explained.

Molinaro also accused Cuomo’s administration of having “cooked the books” on the nursing home death count, which was later confirmed by two state investigations, once they “knew that the order was causing great loss”

“When pressed to explain the discrepancy between the reported death count and the true mortality rate, Mr. Cuomo was shockingly callous — testifying ‘6,500 versus 9,000…who cares, what difference did it make?'” the readout of the interview on Capitol Hill shows.

This entry was added to the timeline on 10 August 2024.