QAnon Drop: New York Health Website COVERS UP Cuomo’s Order & Cuomo Granted Immunity to Nursing Home Executives, After Big-money Campaign Donation

An article published on the socialist website Jacobin, and re-published by The Guardian, reports that the New York State Democratic Committee, then backing Cuomo’s primary run in 2018, received more than $1 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) — a lobbying group for hospital systems, some of which own nursing homes.

The donation made the group one of the state party’s largest contributors in that cycle. Three of the hospital association’s top officials separately gave more than $150,000 to Cuomo’s campaign between 2015 and 2018, the outlet reported.

That donation is now drawing scrutiny after Cuomo signed legislation last month that protects executives from lawsuits — just as he is under continued criticism for his March 25 order (since deleted) requiring nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients.

On May 10, and amid increasing criticism, Cuomo issued a new directive stating that hospitals cannot send patients back to nursing homes in the state unless they tested negative for the virus.

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The budget provision says that officials “shall have immunity from any liability, civil or criminal, for any harm or damages alleged to have been sustained as a result of an act or omission in the course of arranging for or providing healthcare services” to deal with the outbreak.

The article reports that critics are now trying to repeal that provision amid concerns that it removed a deterrent against nursing homes and hospital corporations cutting corners in the treatment of coronavirus patients. But the measures were drafted and aggressively advocated for by the group, the outlet says.

Cuomo’s office responded to the report in a statement to The Guardian, saying that the measure was to protect health care workers during a national crisis. In Washington, Republicans similarly have sought to include broad liability protection for businesses in any future round of relief legislation.

“This pandemic remains an unprecedented public health crisis and we had to realign New York’s entire healthcare system, using every type of facility to prepare for the surge, and recruiting more than 96,000 volunteers – 25,000 from out of state, to help fight this virus,” said Cuomo’s senior adviser Rich Azzopardi. “These volunteers are good samaritans and what was passed by 111 members of the legislature was an expansion of the existing Good Samaritan Law to apply to the emergency that coronavirus created. If we had not done this, these volunteers wouldn’t have been accepted and we never would have had enough frontline healthcare workers.”

“This law was intended to increase capacity and provide quality care, and any suggestion otherwise is simply outrageous,” he said.The article, featured on a major socialist website, marks pressure not only from conservative critics but also those on Cuomo’s left — even after he had initially received glowing praise for his performance in press conferences by media outlets.

A scathing Associated Press report out Friday was highly critical of the way in which Cuomo had handled the state’s nursing home coronavirus crisis. It found more than 4,300 coronavirus-infected elderly patients were sent to vulnerable nursing homes.

Cuomo and his administration have tried to deflect that criticism, saying it was following guidelines issued by the Trump administration.

The guidelines say a nursing home “can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 … as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance.” The guidance also says “nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present.”

“Not could. Should,” Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor and Cuomo’s top aide, said at a Saturday press conference. “That is President Trump’s CMS and CDC…There are over a dozen states that did the exact same thing.”

Nursing care facilities, home to some of the most vulnerable citizens, have been coronavirus hotspots around the country. New York leads the nation with the most reported coronavirus nursing home deaths at more than 5,000 — though the state changed how it counts deaths so the number of nursing home patient deaths could be even higher.

Fox News’ Marisa Schultz, Gregg Re and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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New York officials have scrubbed Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 order requiring nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients from the state health department website — even as Cuomo’s office insists that the order, which has been linked to thousands of nursing home deaths, remains in effect.

View and download the order here.

The web page that once contained the order now directs to a page indicating that the file is “not found.” The archive indicates that the deletion occurred sometime after May 5, around the time that criticism over New York’s nursing home fatalities intensified.

A copy of the page saved by the Internet archive Wayback Machine, however, shows that Cuomo’s order stated: “No resident shall be denied readmission or admission to the NH [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs [Nursing homes] are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

On May 10, Cuomo issued a new directive stating that hospitals cannot send patients back to nursing homes in the state unless they tested negative for the virus. The move appeared to largely invalidate the March 25 directive.

However, senior Cuomo communications director Peter Ajemian insisted in an email to Fox News that it was “not accurate” to state that Cuomo had “reversed” the March 25 order.

“He didn’t reverse or rescind anything,” Ajemian wrote at the time. “The order is still in effect. He did add a directive, this one directed at hospitals, saying they must test patients and the patients must be negative before being sent back to a nursing home. And he is requiring nursing homes to test staff twice a week.”

On Tuesday, a Cuomo spokesperson said that the state Department of Health (DOH) updates its website as a matter of ordinary course to avoid confusion, but did not say whether the governor’s office played a role in the decision to eliminate the text of the March 25 order from the DOH website.

“DOH posted updated guidance that builds on the original March 25 guidance which barred nursing homes from discriminating against COVID patients,” Ajemian separately told Fox News. “As we said at the time, the updated guidance didn’t supersede the March 25th guidance – rather, it added a new requirement that says hospitals cannot discharge patients to nursing homes until they test negative. Then and now, nursing homes cannot discriminate against COVID patients and they cannot accept patients if they aren’t able to provide adequate care, including staff screenings, PPE and infection control measures like cohorting.”

FILE – In this April 17, 2020, file photo, a patient is loaded into an ambulance by emergency medical workers outside Cobble Hill Health Center in the Brooklyn borough of New York. New York state is now reporting more than 1,700 previously undisclosed deaths at nursing homes and adult care facilities as the state faces scrutiny over how it’s protected vulnerable residents during the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

On Saturday, Cuomo doubled down on his state’s now-scrapped nursing home policy and instead blamed the problem on President Trump and his administration.

“New York followed the president’s agencies’ guidance,” Cuomo said during his press conference. “… What New York did was follow what the Republican Administration said to do. That’s not my attempt to politicize it. It’s my attempt to depoliticize it. So don’t criticize the state for following the president’s policy.”

The governor’s office said New York’s original nursing home policy was in line with a March 13 directive from the Trump administration’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Centers from Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that went out to all states on how to control infections in nursing homes. The guidance said “nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present.”

“Not could. Should,” Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor and Cuomo’s top aide, said at the Saturday press conference. “That is President Trump’s CMS and CDC… There are over a dozen states that did the exact same thing.”

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Cuomo has been under scrutiny from GOP politicians who say the governor should have never allowed recovering coronavirus patients to leave hospitals and go back to their residential nursing homes to spread the contagious virus.

Nursing care facilities, home to some of the most vulnerable citizens, have been coronavirus hotspots around the country. New York leads the nation with the most reported coronavirus nursing home deaths at more than 5,000 — though the state changed how it counts deaths, so the numbers of nursing home patient deaths could be even higher.

The Daily Caller News Foundation exclusively reported that in early May, the New York State Department of Health quietly switched from disclosing coronavirus deaths “of all nursing home and adult care facility residents, regardless of whether the patient died at their long-term care facility or at a hospital,” to only disclosing coronavirus deaths “of long-term care patients who died while physically present at their facility.”

EMT’s move a stretcher at the Gateway Care and Rehabilitation Center on Thursday, April 9, 2020, in Hayward, Calif. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

Of the nation’s more than 26,000 coronavirus deaths in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, a fifth of them — about 5,300 — are in New York, according to a count by The Associated Press, and the toll has been increasing by an average of 20 to 25 deaths a day for the past few weeks.

“The way this has been handled by the state is totally irresponsible, negligent and stupid,” said Elaine Mazzotta, a nurse whose mother died last month of suspected COVID-19 at a Long Island nursing home. “They knew better. They shouldn’t have sent these people into nursing homes.”

Another key criticism is that New York took weeks after the first known nursing home outbreaks to begin publicly reporting the number of deaths in individual homes.

By the time New York began disclosing the deaths in the middle of April, the state had several major outbreaks with at least 40 deaths each, most of which were a surprise to the surrounding communities and even some family members.

“The numbers, the deaths keep ticking up,” said MaryDel Wypych, an advocate for older adults in the Rochester area. “It’s just very frustrating.”

Fox News’ Marisa Schultz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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