The blue state nursing home killers

Monica Showalter:

How's this for a disgusting evasion of responsibility?

Fox News reports:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday again defended his administration's now-scrapped nursing home policy that critics say contributed to thousands of coronavirus deaths, slamming the controversy as "a shiny object" and "pure politics."

Cuomo's comments came during an interview on New York's WAMC-AM on Thursday. He was asked about the criticism and whether he acknowledged the policy was "on the wrong track."

"No," the Democratic governor responded. "The nursing home is an unfortunate situation on two levels. Number 1, people in nursing homes died. The nursing home [controversy] is pure politics, the Republicans in Congress, they think there's a vulnerability."

He added: "The nursing home thing it's just all politics."

Cuomo went on to say the criticism is just a way to deflect criticism from the Trump administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

He added: "We had the worse case in the United States because the federal government had no idea what was going on. Where was the CDC? And where was the NIH? And where was everybody?"

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has called the mass COVID-19 deaths in New York's nursing homes "the nursing home thing" and "a shiny object" being played with for political purposes by his opponents instead of the raw, rank, killing scandal that caused more than 10,000 people to lose their lives in nursing homes.  These patients were not just unprotected, but explicitly put in harm's way on his orders.

It doesn't take a genius to know that in an era when nursing home patients were being blocked off from visits by their loved ones to protect them from potential coronavirus exposure, that putting live, COVID-19-positive patients right there in their closed living quarters where no one could get out was a death sentence to thousands — who ended up dying terrified and alone.  That was done at his order on March 25 on "non-discrimination" grounds, even as President Trump sent a hospital ship to New York harbor fully ready to take care of them.

Every last claim he makes about this fiasco is refuted by facts.  Cuomo insisted that those nursing homes take those patients; he threatened to pull their certifications if they didn't; he forbade them from testing those incoming COVID-19 patients; and the hospitals sent the patients in, complete with boxes full of body bags for the inevitable deaths to follow.  Phone calls to the Cuomo's office begging for a change of course went unanswered.  And until the proof of that order got out, Cuomo was denying the whole thing and blaming "greedy" nursing homes for taking the COVID patients.  Now he's claiming, falsely, that he was following the CDC, which he claims, was somehow absent, even though the rest of us could get it on our television sets every night.

Today, Cuomo says he wouldn't place his own mother in a nursing home.  With his brand of leadership in the state, no one should.

Four other governors also ordered nursing homes to seed themselves with COVID-19 patients — California's Gavin Newsom, Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania's Tom Wolf, and New Jersey's Phil Murphy.  And as a result, most nursing home deaths, often by very large percentages, made up the bulk of the COVID-19 deaths.  What do these places have in common?  That's right: they are all one-party blue states with no political competition.  That's worth noting — that's worth talking about — because somehow, none of these catastrophes happened in red states.

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It was one of the most shameful acts of "leadership" in dealing with the pandemic.  It was happening at the same time that Red State governors were under attack for their handling of the pandemic even though they did a much better job of protecting the most vulnerable.   It is a combination of a blue staete scandal and a media scandal.