Oh, good. Another Cuomo scandal
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https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/High-level-health-officials-were-tasked-with-16044748.php
High-level members of the state Department of Health were directed last year by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor's relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Members of Cuomo's family including his brother, his mother and at least one of his sisters were also tested by top health department officials — some several times, the sources said.
The medical officials enlisted to do the testing, which often took place at private residences, included Dr. Eleanor Adams, an epidemiologist who graduated from Harvard Medical School and in August became a special adviser to Zucker. Adams conducted testing on Cuomo's brother Chris at his residence on Long Island, according to the two people.
"If their job was to go test an old lady down in New Rochelle, that’s one thing — that’s actually good," one of the people with knowledge of the matter said. "This was not that."
Others who were given priority testing include Rick Cotton, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and his wife, as well as Patrick J. Foye, head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Members of the media, state legislators and their staff also were tested in similar fashion, although there is no indication those tests were done by high-level health department officials.
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We used to have a guy here, who worked in the city government of the closest city to where I live. He was definitely from New Yawk...After retiring from a government job up there, he moved down here, both because of family and a new job.
He hated the Cuomo family. He said the best way to describe them, was as a political mafia. Intimidation, political job rewards, contracts for political supporters...You name whatever legal or semi-legal lever of power or retribution they could use, they used it.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@george-k said in Oh, good. Another Cuomo scandal:
He got his brother tested by pulling strings. His brother, the TV personality.
How is that not an abuse of power?
He's clearly a scumbag.
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New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s relatives and other well-connected New Yorkers were among those given preferential treatment at state coronavirus testing centers. State troopers were on standby to rush their samples to a lab to be expedited. And those with priority status got results within hours or a day compared to a wait of up to a week that other New Yorkers faced at the time.
Seven individuals with firsthand knowledge of testing practices said that some people with access to power were able to largely bypass the overburdened resources available to the general public when the pandemic first gripped New York last year. …
But people familiar with the efforts said they were also told to treat individuals differently because of their connections to the governor.
During the early frenetic weeks in March 2020, officials working at testing sites rapidly assembled a system that gave special treatment to people described by staff as “priorities,” “specials,” “inner circle” or “criticals,” according to five people, including three nurses, who described how resources were redirected to serve those close to the governor and other cases that were fast-tracked.
And a top state physician whose pandemic portfolio involved coordinating testing in nursing homes was dispatched multiple times to the Hamptons home of CNN host Chris Cuomo, the governor’s brother, in testing visits that sometimes stretched hours, according to two people with knowledge of the consultations. …
Among Cuomo relatives, Chris Cuomo’s family received attention that appeared to go beyond that of others, receiving multiple visits at their Hamptons home from Department of Health physician Eleanor Adams, according to two people familiar with the visits.
At the time, Adams had a senior role for the state, coordinating testing issues for high-risk settings such as nursing homes. Cuomo’s home in Southampton is roughly 90 miles from New York City.
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The federal government is expanding its probe into New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, adding on an investigation into whether Cuomo fast-tracked his family and other connected Democrats for hard-to-find COVID-19 tests even as nursing homes begged for assistance.
Cuomo is already under investigation by both the FBI and the United States Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn over reports his office deliberately hid data on how many deaths resulted from his pandemic nursing home policy, which mandated that long-term and adult care facilities accept recovering COVID-19 patients even if they were still testing positive for the virus.
Now, the feds want to know whether Cuomo, who had access to precious COVID-19 testing kits in the early days of the pandemic, connected those tests with his brother and administration allies.
“Federal investigators are examining whether New York state officials gave priority access to COVID-19 testing to some of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s close associates and his brother during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, according to people familiar with the matter,” Fox News reported Thursday. “The review of the testing marks an expansion of the probe that the investigators, based in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, opened in February to look at how the Cuomo administration handled COVID-19 in nursing homes.”
“Prosecutors have recently contacted and scheduled interviews with officials in the Democratic governor’s office who worked on the testing program, some of the people said,” according to Fox.
As The Daily Wire reported earlier this year, “High-level members of the state Department of Health were directed last year by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor’s relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration … Members of Cuomo’s family including his brother, his mother, and at least one of his sisters were also tested by top health department officials — some several times.”
In addition, it appears many of those requests were given priority over pleas from nursing homes that desperately needed to know whether patients returning to their facilities were putting other residents at risk. Despite direct requests, the New York Department of Health provided only enough COVID-19 testing kits for three nursing facilities, per the New York Post.
Cuomo is also facing an impeachment inquiry, and it, too, will expand to focus on Cuomo’s handling of COVID-19 testing.
