An explosive report released by the New York Times on Thursday night alleges that top aides rewrote a paper written by the New York Department of Health Officials in June 2020.
This was done in order to omit many of the nursing home deaths. And more importantly, this was done months before the federal government began investigating New York.
That means that when Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa said the numbers were changed because of the fed’s investigation, she was lying.
The NYT report that was based on interviews with many sources within the Cuomo administration say the numbers were changed to protect Cuomo from his disastrous program that sent COVID positive patients into nursing homes.
It has been estimated that the program cost at least 1,000 lives.
The same holds true for Michigan and Pennsylvania that adopted the very same program as Cuomo’s.
The main way in which they hid the deaths was to0 no0t count patients who died after going to the hospital and not from the nursing homes where they contracted the disease.
The Department of Health wanted those deaths added to the report but the Cuomo administration ignored them and left them out of the count.
None of the aides who fudged the numbers have any experience in the medical community, so the changing of the numbers was for political cover only.
The Times report also notes that the controversial decision, which was allegedly carried out by top Cuomo aides Melissa DeRosa and Linda Lacewell, was finalized just days before Cuomo sought approval from a state ethics agency to earn money from book sales — ultimately, Cuomo was paid an advance of $783,000 by Harper Collins to write a book about how he handled the pandemic, due in large part to the fact that he had successfully convinced many people that his office had handled the pandemic well.
The report would ultimately declare that Cuomo’s policies with respect to nursing homes were broadly consistent with federal guidance, but “may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities.”
In a response to a request for comment from the Times, Cuomo’s special counsel Beth Garvey said that “the out-of-facility data was omitted after D.O.H. could not confirm it had been adequately verified,” and that the additional death tolls would not have changed the conclusions of the report, if they had been included.
