2 March 2025: Families of Cuomo's Nursing Home Victims Opposing Cuomo's NYC Mayoral Run

Family of Cuomo’s COVID nursing home victims blast ‘disqualified’ gov’s quest for more power

Andrew M. Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace from New York's governor's mansion rather than face impeachment in New York's state legislature, announced on 1 March 2025 that he would run for election to become New York City's next mayor.

Cuomo's announcement triggered an immediate negative reaction among the surviving families of victims of Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, which forced nursing homes to accept patients known to have COVID infections during the worst phase of 2020's coronavirus pandemic.

Family members of COVID-19 nursing home victims vowed to fight former Gov. Cuomo’s mayoral candidacy “every step of the way” — saying his handling of the pandemic “disqualified” him from mounting a political comeback.

“When you fail the most vulnerable who need the most help and are counting on the leadership to be top notch, he already disqualified himself from this race,” Vivian Rivera-Zayas, whose mother, Ana, died after contracting COVID-19 at a Long Island nursing home, told The Post.

“We’re going to continue to fight him every step of the way, hoping that he will not be elected our mayor.”

The article captures the reaction of another prominent anti-Cuomo advocate whose family was directly impacted by Cuomo's deadly policy decision:

Peter Arbeeny, who believes his father, Norman, contracted the virus at a Brooklyn nursing home in March 2020 and died the following month, ripped Cuomo’s callous attitude.

“His most famous term was, ‘Who cares where they died?'” said Arbeeny, 58, referring to Cuomo’s gripe at a 2021 press conference after a state attorney general’s report found he downplayed the number of nursing home residents killed by the bug. Cuomo repeated the question during a House committee hearing last year.

At this point, we'll interject to note that Cuomo and senior members of his administration clearly cared where they died, otherwise they would not have deliberately omitted the deaths of nursing home residents who were infected in their nursing homes but were transferred to other medical facilities where they subsequently died from the state's official count of COVID nursing home fatalities, which is a point that Cuomo made during testimony under oath before a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee in September 2024. The cover-up of the full extent of COVID nursing home deaths is one of the major parts of Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals.

The Arbeeny family's wrongful death lawsuit against the state of New York was dismissed on 30 September 2024. After commenting about several other civil court lawsuits that were dismissed, Cuomo's spokesperson Richard Azzopardi gave comments about the Arbeeny family's case that were reported in this article:

Azzopardi also noted that Arbeeny filed a lawsuit against the state that was dismissed, but “the facts that came out of that clearly show” his father’s nursing home did not admit any COVID-positive patients until three weeks after he had been discharged.

Azzpardi's comment represents a clear admission that patients known to be infected with COVID were deliberately placed in the nursing home where the Arbeeny's father had lived, where their infections could have been spread and infected other nursing home residents. Under Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, the nursing home would be blocked from refusing to admit infected patients with the highly infectious condition that was known to be especially fatal to the sick and elderly.

This article was published on 1 March 2025, we're catching up to it today.