The editor of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s book on his leadership during the pandemic said he stopped promoting the title because of an investigation into the retention of data on the deaths of asylum residents.
Sales of the book, “American Crisis: Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”, had already declined dramatically when the governor found himself involved in overlapping crises of his own making, including a drum beat of accusations about his inappropriate behavior for with younger women and manipulation of data from the nursing home by their assistants.
Gillian Blake of the Crown Publishing Group said in response to an email from The New York Times that “there were no plans” to reprint Cuomo’s book or reissue it in paperback, citing “the ongoing investigation into NYS reports of Covid-related fatalities in nursing homes.”
The book was published by Crown, a division of Penguin Random House, which hurried to publish it last year. The publisher celebrated its acquisition in an ad last summer, describing how Mr. Cuomo, “in his own voice”, would write about “the decision-making that shaped his political policy”.
A spokesman for Cuomo did not immediately return a request for comment.
Mr. Cuomo and his top aides hid the real number of nursing home residents with Covid-19 who died, excluding those who died in hospitals outside the state’s official count for the past year.
The Cuomo government released the data in February, after a report by state attorney general Letitia James suggested a widespread underestimation, and a court ordered the data to be released after an Empire Center Freedom of Information case, a think conservative tank.
Cuomo started working on the book early last summer, receiving praise for his pandemic leadership and enjoying a wave of national popularity fueled by his daily press conferences.
The decision to publish a triumphant account of the state’s battle against the coronavirus was questioned by some political observers at the time, especially considering the overwhelming death toll in New York and the second wave of the disease that was approaching while Cuomo ran promotional events for the book. Cuomo, however, said the book was not premature, arguing that it was a “middle ground” in the pandemic and noting that the manuscript offered a “plan to move forward”.
Critics and political opponents of the governor, including President Donald J. Trump, had previously raised questions about the delivery of nursing homes in New York, which were hit hard during the worst days of the outbreak in March and April.
In June, Cuomo’s top advisers were actively fighting their own Department of Health over what data to include in a report studying the deaths of nursing home residents. At the time, the state was publicly reporting that about 6,500 nursing home residents died, leaving out those who were transported to hospitals. The actual count was more than 9,000, according to a chart prepared for the report and revised by The Times.
As soon as the advisors, including their highest advisor, Melissa DeRosa, learned that the Health Secretariat intended to include that larger number, they rewrote the report to remove it, according to documents and interviews with people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The governor’s office said that the nursing home numbers were still being finalized at the time and that the total number of fatalities in the state remained the same.
Four days after the report was published, Cuomo publicly said for the first time in a radio interview on July 10 that he was considering writing a book. By that time, he had already started asking permission from a state supervisory agency to obtain outside income from the sale of books.
The book was not formally announced until the following month. It hit stores in October and was quickly declared a best seller.
But its sales were marked as a new wave of coronavirus infections reaching the state and the country. This trend seemed to intensify in the past six weeks, as the governor’s public image plummeted as a result of a cascade of scandals.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have been investigating how the state is dealing with asylums, according to three people familiar with the matter.
“Pending the ongoing investigation,” said Blake in the e-mail, “we have stopped active support for ‘American Crisis’ and we have no plans to reprint or reprint in paperback.”
Even before several women accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment in the workplace and other inappropriate behavior, sales were dying. Between January 23 and February 27, the title sold only about 400 copies, according to NPD BookScan, with a total of 45,800 sold and several thousand e-books also purchased. (Online sales are tabulated much more slowly, according to BookScan.)
Mr. Cuomo did not say how much money was paid to write “American Crisis”, which covers a period from the discovery of the first case in New York on March 1 to June 19, when he gave the last of more than 100 consecutive cases daily news updates.
A chapter of the book was focused on May 10, when the governor reversed the course of a March memorandum that required asylums to receive or readmit positive residents to Covid. The memo became a focal point for attacks by the governor’s critics.
Cuomo spends much of the chapter defending his government’s performance, describing criticisms of the memorandum, dated March 25, as politically motivated.
“Republicans needed an offense to divert attention from the narrative of their flawed federal response – and they needed it badly,” Cuomo wrote in the book. “So they decided to attack Democratic governors and blame them for the deaths in nursing homes.”
But, Mr. Cuomo later argued in the same chapter that “the facts have totally defeated the republican claim”
“New York ranked 46th out of 50 in the country when it came to the percentage of deaths in nursing homes,” wrote the governor, citing a July report that suggested that “the virus entered nursing homes when the workforce was infected. “
New York’s real position in a ranking of states would have been worse if the real number – about 50 percent higher than it had revealed – had been included in the analysis.
Cuomo government officials and state health officials said that even with the additional data, the conclusions of the July 6 report – that the March memorandum was not the main factor in deaths in nursing homes – remained the same. The retention of the true number of nursing home residents who died has not changed the overall number of deaths from Covid-19 in New York – which now stands at more than 47,000, including more than 15,000 nursing home residents.
But with Cuomo’s book in progress, his advisers for months prevented the Department of Health from reviewing the death toll for a considerable increase.
“American Crisis” was published on October 13. Since then, there have been 15,025 deaths from coronaviruses reported across the state of New York, according to The Times database.