Albany, NY (WBEN) - Just before they were set to debate a bill that would determine what the future of the Governor's emergency pandemic powers would be, Lawmakers are reacting to an overnight report from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that aides to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo rewrote a state health department report in June to hide the number of COVID deaths at long-term care facilities.
The report states that Cuomo and his aides began concealing the numbers months before the Trump administration looked to pursue an inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak, which was the reason given to lawmakers for why the administration withheld information by top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa.
The report names DeRosa; Linda Lacewell, the head of the state’s Department of Financial Services; and Jim Malatras, current SUNY chancellor and a former top adviser to Cuomo brought back to work on the pandemic as those directly involved in changing the numbers on the report so that it did not reflect the State's true death total.
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"I found it to be deeply, deeply disturbing," said Assemblywoman Monica Wallace, a Democrat. "What the public can not accept, is misleading or covering up mistakes. That sounds like, if the article is true, what might have happened. The question then is why? Why did they cover that up? If they covered it up to make themselves look good, that's awful and there needs to be accountability for that."
Looking good may not have been the only motivating factor.
The Times says the numbers in the Health Department's report were changed by the administration around the time that Cuomo was seeking approval to earn outside income from writing a book about the pandemic.
"I hope to God that the Governor's profit motive had nothing to do with the decision making, but I do think there absolutely needs to be an investigation in to what happened there," Wallace told WBEN.