Rep. Steve Scalise (D-LA) said New York families who had loved ones die from coronavirus are contacting his office for help obtaining information from Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) related to nursing home deaths, offering his comments on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
Cuomo neglected to use assets made available to him by the Trump administration as part of New York’s coronavirus response, explained Seema Verma, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Verma also noted that Cuomo and other Democrat governors issued coronavirus-related directives contrary to federal government guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“Just in New York, over 2,500 seniors died that should not have died if those [CDC] guidelines were followed,” said Scalise, referring to Cuomo’s policy of placing coronavirus-infected seniors into nursing homes. “So we’ve been trying to get the full data. It’s almost like [Cuomo] is proudly saying, ‘I don’t have to give you the data.’ This is a guy who used to give press conferences for hours at a time talking about transparency and honesty, and he has the data, and he’s bragging that he doesn’t have to show us what really happened in his state.”
Scalise said, “I’ve got more families in New York that have contacted my office telling us to keep fighting to get this data, because they lost loved ones. They lost their moms. They lost their grandparents, and the governor of their own state won’t even tell them what happened and why, because he’s trying to cover this up.”
LISTEN:
New York’s true nursing home death toll cloaked in secrecy,” wrote the Associated Press on Tuesday:
New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes, already among the highest in the nation, could actually be a significant undercount. Unlike every other state with major outbreaks, New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.
That statistic could add thousands to the state’s official care home death toll of just over 6,600. But so far the administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has refused to divulge the number, leading to speculation the state is manipulating the figures to make it appear it is doing better than other states and to make a tragic situation less dire.
Cuomo dismissed calls for an independent inquiry of what took place in New York’s nursing home’s a “political” pursuit to undermine him.
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.