Left-leaning PolitiFact deflected blame on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his role in thousands of nursing home deaths in the state, citing a lack of “hard evidence” that his controversial mandate was heavily to blame.
PolitiFact editor-in-chief Angie Drobnic Holan told CNN’s in-house pundit Brian Stelter on Sunday that Cuomo’s directive for nursing homes to accept patients who had or were suspected of having COVID-19 likely made no “significant difference in COVID deaths.”
POLITIFACT CONTINUES DEFLECTING BLAME ON CUOMO NURSING HOME SCANDAL
“I think the situation is really complicated,” Holan told the “Reliable Sources” host. “Certainly, there are things to criticize about how the administration handled data, but the heart of the matter goes back to last year when the state was asking COVID patients who were ready to be discharged from the hospital, [and] we don’t see hard evidence that that made a significant difference in COVID deaths.”
A bombshell development in the scandal embroiling the New York Democrat emerged last week when an Albany-based watchdog group directly linked Cuomo’s order to more than 1,000 additional resident deaths. The state’s death toll among nursing home residents has surpassed 15,000 since the onset of the pandemic.
Holon echoed Cuomo’s claim that the troubling COVID rate in senior care facilities was due in large part to transmission among staff and visitors. Stelter offered no-push back, failing to mention Cuomo’s alleged cover-up of the troubling death toll which prompted an FBI investigation amid bipartisan calls to strip him of his emergency powers.
“If you look at the statistics, New York is about having the same numbers as other states around the country, and the issue was employees in the nursing homes who didn’t realize they were bringing COVID-19 into the nursing homes so it’s a really complicated situation,” Holon said. ” There’s no clear-cut answers here.”
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CNN and other mainstream networks have showered the New York Democrat with glowing praise early on for his handling of the pandemic, largely ignoring his order which created an onslaught of COVID-19 cases that infected elderly patients and resulted in thousands of deaths among the state’s most vulnerable population.
Stelter finally addressed the controversy on his show last week after ignoring a New York Post report revealing that a top Cuomo aide admitted to Democratic lawmakers that the administration had withheld data to avoid federal scrutiny.
