(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) New York politicians are hovering ravenously over Andrew Cuomo, like vultures circling a mortally wounded stallion.
Mocked as Governor Granny-killer, Cuomo’s fellow Democrats attack him for covering up the needless China-virus deaths of fragile seniors.
Cuomo created the toxic disaster that could send him to Sing Sing:
- Last March 25, Cuomo’s Department of Health ordered nursing homes (NH) as follows: “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”
- Despite relentless pleas for China-virus tests, Cuomo further mandated that day: “NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”
- Cuomo waited until April 30—Day 48 of this national emergency—to ban COVID-19-positive personnel from nursing homes.
No lack of hospital capacity explains Cuomo’s edict, even after nursing-home administrators visualized body bags.
The corona-positive elderly could have quarantined in Samaritan Purses’ 68-bed field hospital in Central Park as early as March 28.
The 1,000-bed USNS Comfort medical ship and the Javits Convention Center’s 2,910-bed pop-up hospital, both supplied by President Donald J. Trump, opened March 30.
Long before Cuomo unplugged his deadly decree on May 10, these underused facilities could have treated seniors until they either yielded to or overcame COVID-19.
After a fortnight, those no longer contagious could have entered nursing homes without endangering others.
But that made too much sense. So, as these seniors teemed with lethal microbes, Cuomo forced them straight into eldercare facilities. No surprise, COVID-negative residents contracted the virus and perished.
According to Cuomo, these deaths totaled 8,711.
But this number was a lie.
The Associated Press surmised in May that Cuomo’s under-reporting whitewashed the devastation of his nursing-home diktat. Cuomo’s fellow Democrats recently confirmed this fact and now target the catastrophically inept governor.
New York’s Democrat attorney general, Letitia James, swooped down on Jan. 28 and took the first bite out of Cuomo’s hide.
Her 76-page report concluded that Cuomo’s nursing-home data “may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent.”
Cuomo’s death toll excluded seniors who left nursing homes and expired at medical centers. These bogus “hospital fatalities” did not bloody Cuomo’s hands.
Soon after James’ devastating findings, Cuomo’s Health Department finally uncooked the books: COVID-related nursing-home deaths through Jan. 19 totaled 12,743. That’s 46.3 percent higher than the 8,711 that Cuomo previously claimed.
Team Cuomo also confessed that the 6,327 COVID-19-positive seniors whom they steered from hospitals into eldercare centers excluded 2,729 “readmissions” of infected patients returned to the facilities from whence they came.
This tally of 9,056 such individuals is 43.1 percent higher than Cuomo’s phony figure.
“Who cares?” the ice-hearted Cuomo said January 29. “Died in a hospital. Died in a nursing home. They died.”
As the New York Post reported, Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa told Democrat state lawmakers on a Feb. 10 conference call that Team Cuomo concealed nursing-home deaths because they might reach the Justice Department and “be used against us…”
DeRosa’s smoking-gun sent the buzzards hovering over Gotham and Albany.
State Sen. Jessica Ramos, D-Queens, wrote via Twitter that Cuomo’s “emergency powers must be rescinded, he & his admin must be subpoenaed, and a full investigation must result in justice for our grieving families.”
Nine Democrat State Assembly members demanded Tuesday that Cuomo lose his emergency powers to rule by fiat during the COVID crisis.
“It is now unambiguously clear that this governor has engaged in an intentional obstruction of justice, as outlined in Title 18, Chapter 73 of the United States Code,” the lawmakers wrote their colleagues.
“This is a necessary first step in beginning to right the criminal wrongs of this Governor and his administration,” they said.
Andrew Cuomo immediately should apologize to the families and loved ones of the thousands of seniors whom his utterly boneheaded decisions needlessly exposed to COVID-19.
Next, he should resign and be handcuffed.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.
