THREE YEARS LATER, STILL NO ANSWERS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: chapin@lighthousepublic.com
Phone: 646-504-1776
Website: www.wecarewall.com

Covid orphans of Cuomo’s New York State Nursing Home COVID Crisis demand an investigation with subpoena power into the deaths of our loved ones

Brooklyn, NY... Three years ago, on March 25, 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a deadly directive to place Covid-positive patients into nursing homes bereft of PPE but filled with the immunocompromised and elderly. This not only defied common sense and flew in the face of any health policy logic, it contributed to the deaths of at least 15,000 New Yorkers, if not thousands more. One of those New Yorkers was my father, proud Brooklynite, Norman Arbeeny.

Not that you would know any of this from Dad’s death certificate. Or from Cuomo’s public statements, either to the press or in his self-congratulatory book. Or from his wildly inaccurate counting of the nursing home corpses, whose real numbers he fought to hide both from the public and from the official nursing home tally by not counting any deaths, such as my father’s, that occurred outside of nursing homes. “The public was misled by the highest level of state government and given a distorted version of reality that suppressed facts when they deserved the truth,” New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli wrote over a year ago. “It is unacceptable that we still don’t know just how many nursing home residents died.”

This statement still holds true a year later. People died, and the government lied. The DOH’s July 6th report to review Cuomo’s March 25th directive’s impact on nursing homes “was not in fact a scientific or medical report,” said DiNapoli. So this week, on the third anniversary of that directive, we are once again demanding a proper investigation with subpoena power and a revision of the July 6th DOH report with current data and today’s science.

I’m a small business owner. A fifth generation Cobble Hill Brooklynite who believes in facts, not conspiracy. A voter who not only admired Cuomo’s father, Mario, I chose to become a democrat at age 18 because of him. Why do I know more facts about this stillunfurling story than have been publicly disclosed? Because though my family and I are not trained as investigative journalists or activists, we’ve been forced into becoming both in order to dig up the lies that buried our father.

In a nutshell, the purpose of our digging was to answer this simple question: Why were nursing homes the first and only option for 9000 COVID positive patients and not the absolute last?

Before Dad died, I didn’t know what a FOIA request was. Now, for lack of a proper investigation into this tragedy, I’ve spent the past three years drafting and sending a whole flurry of FOIA and FOIL requests. I’ve interviewed every human connected to this case that I could think of, from nursing home staff members to loved ones of the deceased to top government officials.

And yet still we have more questions than answers. That being said, here’s a quick summary of what we have been able to glean thus far. (The rest is attached in full detail in two documents, including a detailed timeline of events and questions that still remain to be answered):

• “Coronavirus in a nursing home can be like fire through dry grass,” said Cuomo himself. And yet Dad’s nursing home, The Cobble Hill Health Center—like all nursing homes in New York—was forced by the governor’s directive to accept all Covid-positive patients who were released from the hospitals but still contagious. 58 nursing homes, it should be noted, had zero Covid cases before known Covidpositive patients were admitted to them. “There was only one reasonable way for nursing home operators to read that directive,” said Bill Hammond, Senior Fellow for Health Policy at The Empire Center. “The state was ordering them to accept infected patients.”

• Cuomo falsely claimed he was following CDC guidelines when issuing this directive as well as when he allowed nursing home attendants who’d had their flu shots to go maskless. In fact, a full week before Cuomo’s directive, the CDC urged nursing homes to do just the opposite: to take whatever steps necessary to avoid the spread of COVID after “substantial morbidity and mortality” was noted in the 1st nursing home outbreak in the country.

• The New York State Bar Association concluded that Cuomo’s directive “led to a disaster.” In the words of John Dalli, one of its members, “They should have realized it within two weeks. They didn't. It went on too long and there's no doubt in my mind that an aerosol disease in a facility filled with individuals particularly vulnerable to the disease is simply a recipe for disaster.”

• On April 7, 2020, Vice Admiral Mike Dumont literally begged Cuomo’s administration for help. “We could use some help…” his email began. “We have been trying for days…to transfer more patients to us but with little success.” At the time, his 1000-bed ship, the USNS Comfort, and the 2500-bed provisional hospital in the Javits Center had a grand total of 120 patients. The Cuomo administration has publicly stated, “It should shock no one that we were skeptical of [the admiral’s] motives.”

To date, not one public official or state employee has been questioned under oath. About any of this. The whole chapter has been summarily swept under the rug. “New York was number forty-six out of fifty in the nation when it came to percentage of deaths in nursing homes,” Cuomo falsely* claimed in his book, a lie that would be repeated in the July 6th report and its revision as well. “But this was all politics. No one wanted to hear the facts."

Actually, no. We do want to hear the facts. We want to know why it was that by March 13, 2020, the governor knew enough about the dangers of the virus to lock out families from all nursing homes to keep our loved ones safe—great! good thinking, Governor Cuomo, if painful for us—but then twelve days later, for reasons that still remain unclear, he ordered the virus in. After which he had the temerity to blame us and nursing home staff for infecting our loved ones while making callous public statements about their deaths such as: “Who cares [where they died]? They died!” (He obviously cared where they died, because he and his staff purposely misled the public about it.) At the very least, we’re due an investigation with subpoena power to figure out why. But also? My family should not be the only ones looking into this. The Covid orphans deserve answers and the truth. When will we get them?

* “The New York State data was not comparable to other states,” the NYS Comptrollers Nursing Home audit would later explain, “because it excluded out-of-facility deaths.”

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