Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean criticized the performance of New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo at a news conference on Monday in which he tried to minimize his government’s retention of state law data on deaths in nursing homes.
“He’s a tough guy,” Dean told “The Story” host Martha MacCallum, adding that the governor “cannot be empathic at all.”
Both of Dean’s in-laws died in New York nursing homes last year after Cuomo signed an executive order ordering patients who tested positive for COVID-19 to be taken to long-term care institutions rather than kept in hospitals.
Dean described Cuomo to presenter Martha MacCallum of “The Story” as “a broken record” that passed the blame instead of accepting responsibility.
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Cuomo and his government were forced to play defense after the New York Post reported that one of Cuomo’s top aides admitted that death data in nursing homes was hidden from Democratic state legislators for fear that such information would be used against the government in subsequent investigations.
The governor claimed on Monday that the state legislature’s request for data on deaths in nursing homes had been “paused” while his government “voluntarily complied with the DOJ’s request for information on very different things”.
However, Dean told MacCallum that he recently spoke to a senior Justice Department official who denied having received any information from the Cuomo government.
Dean also questioned Cuomo in an attempt to empathize with bereaved families, mentioning the year 2015 of his own father, former New York governor Mario Cuomo.
“His father did not die alone in a nursing home because his son had an executive order to place more than 9,000 COVID-positive patients in nursing homes,” she said.
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Dean, who called for an investigation into how Cuomo dealt with the COVID crisis, demanded that both New York lawmakers and feds look for answers.
“That’s why we need an independent, bipartisan investigation,” she said. “He didn’t follow science. You don’t put infected patients in nursing homes. That’s the main point, Governor.”