A proposed class-action lawsuit accused the former governor of mishandling COVID-19 patients in nursing homes.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a proposed class-action lawsuit against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that blamed his administration for COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes across the state.
In her order, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla wrote that the plaintiffs in the case did not have the federal right to file a lawsuit against the former governor, a Democrat who is currently running to be the next mayor of New York City, as well as several others who had served in his administration.
The plaintiffs argued in court papers that their family members had contracted COVID-19 in New York state nursing homes due to a March 2020 order issued by Cuomo that prohibited nursing homes from denying the admission of people into their facilities “solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.” The move was done so as to free up hospital bed space during the early onset of the pandemic by sending people from those medical facilities to nursing homes.
“As explained herein, and despite the Court’s deepest sympathy for Plaintiffs and their families, the fact remains that their proffered claims are not legally viable,” Failla wrote in her opinion.
The judge further explained that the complaint lacks “allegations that the nursing homes, as the alleged perpetrators of ‘private violence,’ committed a state-sanctioned violent act that caused decedents harm,” adding that “the amended complaint merely pleads action that ‘increased the likelihood’ that decedents would be unsafe.”
In a statement posted on X on March 31, Cuomo’s spokesman Rich Azzopardi hailed the judge’s decision and said that “anytime this issue gets taken out of the press or the political arena and into the courts, the truth wins,” referring to the nursing home allegations.
Cuomo has faced significant political blowback over the nursing home directive. New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report in early 2021 that a larger number of people in nursing homes died from the virus than what the New York State Department of Health had published at the time, and state officials may have undercounted deaths by as much a 50 percent.
Last year, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, led by Republican lawmakers, recommended that Cuomo face criminal charges. They alleged that he lied during House-led investigations into nursing home deaths in the state during the pandemic.
