A video of celebrities praising Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic has gone viral amidst reports that the New York governor suppressed nursing home casualty data to fend off an investigation.
The video: The footage originally aired as part of a ceremony awarding Cuomo the International Emmy Founders Award “in recognition of his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.”
- Left-wing cultural icons like director Spike Lee, actor Robert De Niro and musician Billy Joel made statements praising Cuomo for being “the man” and giving “something we were not getting from Washington — leadership.”
- The congratulatory reel, which has racked up more than 260,000 views on Twitter, echoed the plaudits Cuomo received in the mainstream press as the coronavirus claimed the lives of nearly 15,000 New York nursing home residents.
- Cuomo went on to write a book about “leadership” based on his handling of the pandemic, which was released in Oct. 2020, just before a spike in New York’s COVID-19 cases.
The scandal: After an inquiry by New York Attorney General Letitia James found nursing home resident deaths in New York had been underreported by as much as 50 percent, Cuomo’s administration was accused of conducting a cover-up.
- One of Cuomo’s top aides admitted privately that the governor’s office did not fully report the numbers out of fear Trump’s Justice Department would open a formal investigation, the New York Post reported last week.
- “We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, and what we start saying, was going to be used against us and we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation,” Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor, said during a conference call with Democratic legislators.
- DeRosa added that the real fault lay with former President Donald Trump for turning nursing home deaths into “a giant political football.”
