Andrew Cuomo, the former Governor of New York who resigned following sexual harassment scandals, confessed in a recent interview with public health advocate Leana Wen that his administration did not have the legal authority to enforce pandemic mandates, despite implementing them forcefully during the COVID-19 crisis.
In the conversation, Cuomo shared his views on the diminishing public trust in government authority, especially regarding health regulations.
“I believe if the government were now to say, ‘We just made a finding that there’s a new virus, and everyone should do X, Y, and Z,’ the amount of compliance with X, Y, and Z would be much, much lower than it was at the beginning of COVID because people do not trust the government, especially on this issue, the way they did at the beginning. That would be a complicating factor. When you have people who just don’t listen because the government had no capacity to enforce any of this.
You must wear a mask. People wore masks in New York. But if they said, ‘I’m not wearing a mask,’ there was nothing I could do about it.
You must close your private business. ‘I won’t.’ Well, there was nothing I could really do about it. It was really all voluntary, and it was extraordinary, you think about it, that society acted with that uniformity voluntarily because I had no enforcement capacity. You have a reduced trust in government.”
WATCH:
Governor Cuomo’s claims that compliance with health directives during the pandemic was voluntary and unenforced are false.
He wielded authoritarian power, imposing strict mandates on New Yorkers, such as mandatory mask-wearing and business closures under threat of penalties or imprisonment.
Despite New York leading in COVID-19 deaths despite high vaccination rates, Cuomo’s policies contributed to the deaths of over 11,000 seniors by requiring nursing homes to accept infected patients.
The true death toll was 49% higher than reported.
Cuomo profited from a book praising his pandemic response while the Joint Commission on Public Ethics ordered him to return $5.1 million made from the book deal.
However, the Biden Department of Justice dropped an investigation into Cuomo and other Democrat governors for their deadly nursing home policies, denying justice to the victims.
