He’s got nerve: Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched a blistering attack on President Trump Monday yet had no real answer for his deadly nursing-home edict, which more and more experts are blasting after his folks tried to whitewash it.
“Trump’s COVID scandal makes what Nixon did at Watergate look innocent,” the gov declared. “Nobody died in the Watergate scandal.” He claimed “New York did nothing wrong” in handling the pandemic; it was the feds who “caused our problem.”
Sorry: Washington didn’t force New York nursing homes to admit 6,300 COVID-positive patients. Cuomo and his health commissioner, Howard Zucker, did that on their own, with their March 25 mandate.
Nor is anyone buying last week’s lame Department of Health report, which tried to absolve Team Cuomo of any guilt.
“They really need to own the fact that . . . it was never right to send COVID patients into nursing homes and that people died because of it,” Dr. Michael Wasserman, president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine, told the Associated Press.
Catherine Troisi, an epidemiologist, said the report, which denied the edict contributed to New York’s more than 6,600 nursing-home-resident deaths, was full of holes.
“Would this get published in an academic journal? No,” she said.
Yet Cuomo is as smug as ever: “The facts clearly demonstrate Trump was wrong from Day One,” he bleated. “The numbers are in. Look at the number of bodies.”
Yes, let’s do that: The state’s death toll is around 30,000 — the sixth-highest reported toll in the world and the highest per-capita toll. Cuomo has no right to criticize anyone.