The Justice Department Won’t Investigate COVID Deaths in New York Nursing Homes

Over the last six months, government officials and journalists have surfaced damning information that suggests New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration attempted to diminish the true pandemic death toll in the state’s nursing homes. State attorney general data revealed that New York’s public tally of nursing home deaths may have undercounted the fatalities by up to 50 percent, and the New York Times uncovered efforts by Cuomo’s aides to stop health officials from sharing that data with state lawmakers and the public. These moves coincided with a time when Cuomo was trying to ink a multi-million-dollar deal for a book about his handling of the COVID crisis, capitalizing on the image he’d cultivated as a hard-charging hero of pandemic leadership when New York City was the COVID epicenter in the spring of 2020.

On Friday, the Justice Department disclosed that it has declined to further investigate what happened in New York.

In letters sent to several lawmakers, DOJ said that it would not open a civil investigation into New York’s handling of the pandemic in nursing homes. In a letter to Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), who plans to challenge the three-term embattled incumbent in New York’s gubernatorial race in 2022, the department said that it had requested information from the state of New York last summer. “We have reviewed the information provided,” wrote deputy assistant attorney general Joe Gaeta. “Based on that review we have decided not to open a [Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act] investigation of any public nursing facility at this time.”