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On Tuesday, I will be appearing before the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, a body that according to the resolution creating it, is, among other areas, supposed to investigate “executive branch policies, deliberations, decisions, activities, and internal and external communications related to the coronavirus crisis.”
In practice it has been used to pursue MAGA conspiracies and has focused on validating right-wing obsessions, culminating in a surreal exchange between Dr. Tony Fauci and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), an apparent one-person medical board who tried to take away the decades-long director of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases’ medical license.
I expect much of the same when I address the committee on New York’s response to the pandemic.
Cuomo was one of the key faces of the early days of the pandemic when it hit New York hard. Now he is to be questioned by the COVID Select Committee—but, he writes for the Daily Beast, it has focused on conspiracy theories and ignored the role of then Pres. Donald Trump.
Mike Segar/Reuters
The American people deserve better, but remember what this is for the Republicans: an election-year block-and-tackle operation to protect Donald Trump and deflect from his leadership failures throughout COVID. During the once-in-a-century pandemic not only did then-President Trump fail to lead, he fell under the weight of his own deception, obfuscation, and incompetence. To date 1.2 million Americans have lost their lives to COVID, more than any other country on the globe.
While this committee doesn’t appear sincerely interested in getting to the bottom of that, let’s not forget what we already learned so it can never happen again.
COVID hit the public conscience in January 2020. Rather than organize resources, inform the public, or take decisive action, Trump’s first move was political: to deceive the country and deny reality. Given the evidence of COVID’s spread through China and Europe, Trump’s pronouncements bordered on the delusional, saying on Feb. 27, 2020, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” Less than a month later, he predicted the economy would be reopened by Easter and that “you’ll have packed churches all over our country.”
This was the moment Trump shocked his own medical experts by suggesting injecting bleach could kill the virus which kills COVID saying, “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.”
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The Easter Bunny came and went and—predictably—the virus stayed and spread.
But Trump wasn’t just wrong or ill-advised, he knew full well the very real threat COVID presented, as was detailed in memos written as early as Jan. 29 by top White House adviser Peter Navarro predictingthat the loss of life could reach 2 million Americans.
Indeed, Trump told Bob Woodward as early as Feb. 7, “This is deadly stuff,” two weeks later admitting he “liked playing it down.”
Trump doubled down on this charade, effectively offering his own prescriptions ranging from hydroxychloroquine to sunlight, and even an “injection” of disinfectant as a deterrent. At one point, he tried to impede the states’ ability to conduct COVID testing by pushing Congress to curtail funding based on his stated belief that “if we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases!”
Trump was concerned about his re-election and knew many people would die, but rather than do his job and lead the nation he distanced himself. It was a political and governmental blunder of epic proportions with deadly consequences. He literally said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” and instead deferred the national crisis to the states, delegating more authority to 50 governors than President Lincoln delegated to Gen. Grant during the Civil War.
However, the virus did not stop at state borders, and without a national policy states created a patchwork of different approaches. It also exacerbated partisan differences and disunity, politicizing the pandemic. Fifty states competed against each other for testing capacity, medical personnel, and PPE and other vital equipment.
This protest at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx in New York in April 2020 over a lack of PPE was caused by Trump’s failings, says Cuomo.
Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
When the federal government did act, it was incompetent. The nation’s testing capacity was woefully inadequate. Early on, the CDC insisted on controlling testing and prohibited state laboratories from participating, costing months of deadly delay. The CDC and CMS offered conflicting and incorrect information on basic issues, such as how the virus was transmitted. The president initiated a travel ban from China to the West Coast on Jan. 31, 2020, minimizing the spread in that region, but left the East Coast wide open. Planes carrying COVID-infected passengers from Europe were allowed to land in the Northeast for weeks, until March 13 of that year.
Four years later, politics is once again Trump-ing science. After declaring the expedited vaccine development one of the “greatest miracles in the history of modern-day medicine” Trump has caved to pressure from Republican conservatives as a presidential candidate, adopting extreme stances such a pledging to defund schools with vaccine mandates, and forging an alliance with a rabid anti-vax advocate.
Beyond Trump himself, extremist rhetoric and policies, including those embraced by some of the GOP members of the committee have led to more unnecessary deaths.
Cuomo says Trump’s long record of COVID failure is what led to 1.2 million deaths in the U.S. from the virus, among them these two bodies in a morgue in Manhattan in the early days of the pandemic.
Andrew Kelly/Reuters
An analysis led by the Brown School of Public Health showed that between January 2021 and April 2022, vaccines could have prevented at least 318,000 COVID-19 deaths. Numerous studies show that COVID death rates were higher among those living under Republican governance than those under Democrats. In a paper published in the peer-reviewed Preventive Medicine Reports, researchers in Michigan found Republican-governed counties had significantly higher COVID-19 mortality than their Democratic counterparts.
Despite all this, one part of the federal government—the select committee—is still in denial and is continuing to politicize COVID rather than learn from it. The GOP strategy was, and still is, to fabricate theories to blame the states and governors for the COVID deaths. Obviously, they choose to focus on Democratic governors and New York has been their primary target.
To get to the actual facts, it is necessary to look past the Republicans disinformation campaign. The politics must be debunked, and the shortcomings addressed before the next time—and the next time could be anytime.
Cuomo was the 56th Governor of the State of New York.
