State health officials, tasked with ensuring that “high-risk” populations, including the elderly and residents of nursing and adult care facilities, were retasked to handle COVID-19 tests for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s family, friends, and associates, with at least one high-profile Cuomo health official being dispatched “multiple” times to the Hampton to treat Cuomo’s brother, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.
The Washington Post confirmed earlier reports, Tuesday, that Gov. Cuomo’s “relatives and other well-connected New Yorkers were among those given preferential treatment at state coronavirus testing centers,” adding that New York 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.”
As The Daily Wire noted Monday, Cuomo’s relatives, including Chris, one of the governor’s sisters, and the governor’s mother were all “tested several times during the early days of the pandemic” and that the testing was done “by high-level members” of the state’s health department.
“Others who were given priority testing included the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Rick Cotton, and his wife, as well as Pat Foye, the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Some state legislators and their staff were also tested,” the Albany Times-Union, which has been tracking the story, added.
As Cuomo was dispatching his top docs to care for his family and his cronies, the New York Post noted, nursing home administrators, under pressure from a Cuomo administration order forcing them to accept recovering coronavirus patient regardless of whether the patients remained positive for the virus and contagious, were desperately phoning Cuomo’s offices, begging for additional COVID-19 testing kits, and sending volunteers to criss-cross the state looking for spare tests.
The Washington Post’s Tuesday report identified at least one Cuomo official tasked with tending to the governor’s sick family as state doctor Eleanor Adams, who was, at the time, in charge of ensuring that “high risk” populations were given priority for coronavirus testing.
“[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,” the Post reported. “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,” the Post noted.
New York officials who spoke with the Post denied the reports.
“State officials strongly disputed that people were given special treatment because of ties to Cuomo,” the Post said. “They said priority testing was available to many New York residents involved in the state’s pandemic response, as well as members of the general public, such as those who were at high risk.”
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