March 5, 2025

Can New York Survive a Cuomo Comeback?

During the pandemic, he made one terrible decision after another. Now he wants to be mayor.

By Bill Hammond, Wall Street Journal

March 5, 2025 5:00 pm ET

Andrew Cuomo picked a portentous day to launch his New York City mayoral campaign. Sunday was the fifth anniversary of his announcement, as governor, of the city’s first confirmed case of Covid-19.

The virus had already shut down Wuhan, China, and brought Northern Italy to a standstill. Yet on March 2, 2020, in going public with a positive result from the day before, Gov. Cuomo made an early mistake: underestimating the threat.

“We think we have the best healthcare system on the planet right here in New York,” he said, standing beside Mayor Bill de Blasio. “We don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.”

Mr. Cuomo went on to preside over one of the world’s deadliest Covid outbreaks. Between mid-March and mid-June 2020, almost 23,000 New York City residents died. Normal life stopped, empty streets echoed with sirens, and the economy took a dive from which it has yet to recover fully.

Although Mr. Cuomo’s popularity surged early in the pandemic, he resigned in August 2021 rather than face impeachment. The governor blamed what he called false accusations of sexual harassment, but a host of pandemic-related scandals might have been enough to bring him down.

As Mr. Cuomo seeks a return to high office, it’s worth revisiting how he handled the most important leadership test of his career. Having requested and received special emergency powers from the Legislature, Mr. Cuomo led the statewide pandemic response and shared little of that power.

He and his team got some things right, such as ramping up Covid tests to more than 10,000 a day in three weeks and building a data-tracking system that gave a clear picture of the outbreak’s trajectory. He also filled a void for many Americans with his daily televised briefings, offering seemingly authoritative and steady commentary that was a contrast with the often erratic Trump administration.

Before long, however, Mr. Cuomo had squandered that goodwill through decisions that ranged from bad to scandalous to breathtakingly venal. Notorious among these missteps was his administration’s order compelling nursing homes to accept thousands of patients who were believed to have Covid and were being transferred from hospitals. Issued on March 25, 2020, when nursing-home infections were already soaring, the policy was far from the only threat to elderly residents but doubtless made a dire situation worse.

That might have been excused as a mistake under extraordinary pressure—an attempt to head off massive hospital overcrowding, which was feared but thankfully never happened. Yet Mr. Cuomo and his team compounded the mess by failing to consult or even warn nursing homes—or to include the caveats and warnings about infection control that were set forth in federal guidelines at the time.

When the policy came under fire, the Cuomo administration spent months covering up the full death toll in nursing homes. This included falsifying a Health Department report, refusing to provide accurate data to the Legislature and media, and stymieing Freedom of Information Law requests from the Empire Center and others. Only when the Empire Center won a court order in February 2021 did the department come clean. The true fatality count in nursing homes and adult-care facilities was almost 15,000, or 5,600 more than the state had previously acknowledged.

Mr. Cuomo’s administration also arranged priority Covid testing for the governor’s friends, associates and family members when test kits were scarce—leaving many healthcare providers flying blind. In some cases, a Health Department doctor was dispatched to the homes of VIPs, including Mr. Cuomo’s brother, Chris, with state troopers transporting the samples to Albany for expedited processing at an overworked Health Department lab.

In July 2020, Mr. Cuomo signed a book deal for more than $5 million. Presented as “leadership lessons,” his memoir hit stores in October 2020, not long before a second wave of Covid began to ravage nursing homes. Investigators later established that Mr. Cuomo had produced the book with extensive use of state personnel and equipment, flouting an agreement he had signed with state ethics regulators.

These scandals point to a profound arrogance suffusing Mr. Cuomo’s actions. It turned out that his briefings weren’t as authoritative as they seemed. Although the governor proclaimed he was guided by science, his publicly released schedules showed little evidence that he had consulted experts. The one public-health scientist with whom he was in regular contact—Health Commissioner Howard Zucker—later reported that he had limited input. Dr. Zucker “did not feel able to speak freely to the former Governor or senior Executive Chamber employees, as advice that was contrary to the Chamber’s views was often rejected,” the Assembly impeachment report said of his testimony.

Another issue was public squabbling between the governor and Mr. de Blasio. Mr. Cuomo repeatedly went out of his way to reject policy responses floated by the mayor—such as the idea of a “stay at home” order—only to announce the proposal as his own a day or two later.

A Health Department official told investigators in the attorney general’s office that she and her colleagues “were not allowed to collaborate with our peers in the local health departments and the New York City Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, which is a critical component in an outbreak response.” What public-health goal could be served by cutting off cooperation between state and local health officials in the middle of a pandemic?

Despite the extensive factual record, Mr. Cuomo continues to deny wrongdoing—and to lie about what happened. In October a U.S. House subcommittee investigating his pandemic response formally requested that the Justice Department prosecute Mr. Cuomo for making false statements to Congress.

Whether his pandemic transgressions should disqualify Mr. Cuomo from the mayor’s office is for voters to decide. They can choose to forgive and forget—but first they should remember the truth about his pandemic leadership.

Mr. Hammond is senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center.