September 26, 2023 - 1:00pm
Former New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, at one point considered a hero for leading that state’s Covid response, has predicted that he would struggle to implement similar pandemic restrictions if another virus swept through the country.
In a recent episode of his podcast “As A Matter of Fact”, Cuomo discussed the Covid-19 pandemic with Dr Leana Wen, a Public Health Professor at George Washington University. The former governor said that, in a future pandemic, “the amount of compliance…would be much, much lower than it was in the beginning of Covid because people do not trust the government — especially on this issue.”
“I believe if the government were to now say ‘we just made a finding that there’s a new virus and everyone should do X,Y and Z,’” he said, “the amount of compliance with X, Y and Z would be much, much lower”.
The former governor noted that resistance from “people who just don’t listen” would be a “complicating factor” in enforcing restrictions. Discussing his time in office during Covid-19, Cuomo admitted that his powers were limited in what he could tell people to do. “If they said ‘I’m not wearing a mask’ there is nothing I could do about it. Or ‘you must close your private business’. ‘I won’t’. Well, there was nothing I could do about it.”
Cuomo went on to praise New Yorkers for their response to his pandemic restrictions, saying that it was “extraordinary” that people had “acted with…uniformity” because he had “no enforcement capacity”.
Such was the former New York governor’s popularity during the height of the pandemic that his approval rating soared to 87% by the end of March 2020. His interviews with brother Chris Cuomo became a mainstay on CNN’s Prime Time, regularly attracting millions of viewers for his appearances, but they were also criticised for their perceived chumminess.
The cable network even went so far as to compare Cuomo’s briefings on the virus to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”. Then in October 2020, Cuomo wrote a book on the subject, ‘American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic’, netting himself $5.1 million in the process.
Though Cuomo’s record on Covid-19 won praise at the time, it came to be seen less favourably as time has passed. The governor was initially bullish, declaring that “we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries” before pivoting to panic, introducing a tough lockdown. He prohibited all social gatherings, but almost 80,000 deaths and millions of infections resulted. Poorer hospitals lacked resources and staff wore bin bags in lieu of surgical equipment.
Nursing homes were particularly hard hit, and accusations of a cover up of the death toll eroded Cuomo’s credibility. He has also been accused of petty infighting with New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, and a patchy vaccine rollout. Eventually, he resigned from office in August 2021 over allegations of sexual misconduct.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThere are still quite a few people who are afraid of COVID – at least some of them may have health issues that put them at greater risk. Fair enough.
But there are many other people who would now favour the Swedish attitude to lockdowns or the Great Barrington Declaration proposals – if such were needed.
Some, of course, were never convinced.
So perhaps the ‘authority’ of Governments has been damaged by its disproportionate use? For COVID and other fearsome prospects too.
I sincerely doubt it. Those favouring Barrington now are the same swivel-eyed loons that thought it was the right approach to begin with.
Um, those “loons” were right; lockdowns and masking did nothing to reduce deaths. Compare pretty much any country in the world to Sweden, and no-lockdowns wins handily.
Vaccines also do nothing for the large majority of the population (under 65 without major co-morbidities). The entire COVID response was basically a waste. We could have carried on taking private precautions, and the same number of people would have died, and we’d have tens of trillions less in Gov’t debt.
I’m curious as to whether you actually believe this stuff, or just like to spout it on the internet.
You could read the studies, or you can continue to worship at the altar of “The Science”tm*
*warning bears no relationship to actual scientific reasoning or research.
The Great Barrington Declaration wasn’t about quarantining every single senior and person with health issues. You seem to have the misperception that it was. It was about giving healthy people the freedom to continue living and working as normal, and providing at-risk people a place where they could actually isolate themselves. The garbage lockdowns we had didn’t do any of that. People working outside the home would bring the virus home with them, and infect any at-risk person who lived with them, because they didn’t actually have a place to isolate properly.
Are you an expert on vaccinations? You sound like an expert. Care to enlighten us as to your qualifications, and your peer-reviewed publications in this area that you pronounce so authoritatively on?
And, absent lockdowns, how exactly would I have taken “private precautions” in the teeth of fossilised employers’ managerialist fixations with travelling miles to offices to switch on laptops? At all costs, we must save the city centre baristas, don’t you agree?
Here are the figures, as at Sept 2023, for total covid 19 deaths per million – Sweden beats Northern Ireland, but that’s hardly much to write home about, given that most people I knew ignored lockdowns completely. In reality, Sweden loses handily:
UK: 3,397
US: 3,332
N. Ireland: 2,861
Sweden: 2,348
Germany: 2,099
Ireland: 1,833
Denmark: 1,498
Canada: 1,382
Norway: 1,040
Australia: 874
S. Korea: 694
New Zealand: 638
Japan: 603
Sweden was the poster-boy for the anti-vaccer cultists, but they conveniently ignore that there are significant differences between say, England, and Sweden. Social distancing comes naturally to the Swedes, for a variety of geographical, population and cultural reasons:
1. Compared to England, Sweden’s population is circa 700% smaller, and it has circa 400% more land mass.
2. Around half of all Swedish households are made up of one person.
3. They have outdoor nursery schools and class sizes around 40% smaller than Britain’s.
4. Lots of Swedes have summer houses in the North to escape to.
5. They’re more reserved in public to begin with. They don’t need to form a scrum in order to socialise, and they don’t have a culture of covert admiration for rule-breaking.
In effect, business as normal in Sweden would have been more socially distanced than a lockdown in England.
Look at total mortality. COVID death reporting was skewed and differed across countries.
We’ve been over this dozens of times. Simply measuring Covid deaths is a bad comparison. The definition of Covid death was different in each jurisdiction. It also fails to measure the impact of the mitigation strategies. The best comparison is excess deaths and we all know Sweden had amongst the lowest numbers in the world.
One major factor in Sweden’s total Covid death count was their incorrect policy on how to protect those in care homes. They admitted that their approach was totally wrong at first, and that led to an initial high number of Covid deaths.
I somehow think that Robbie is unable to actually face the reality and is living in a fantasy land. The truth is that at the beginning of the Covid pandemic (Jan/Feb 2020) the public health authorities aided by the press panicked. Given that Covid was new, panic spread to virtually the entire population, and as a result much of what was done was based on fear rather than rational thought or the actual reality. In fact what was done went against all previous recommendations dealing with an ILI pandemic. As an example, consider the issue of asymptomatic transmission. This was always nonsense from the get go, and indeed the 1st case of so-called asymptomatic transmission reported out of Germany was not in fact asymptomatic – far from it! The proper handling of the situation would have been to simply protect those at very high risk (i.e. the over 80s, especially in nursing homes where some 40% of the deaths, at least in 2020 occurred) and to tell people to stay at home if they were sick, rather than go to work. Had that been done, the end result would have been better for children (no loss of education and social contacts), the economy, and most people’s sanity, including Robbie’s.
Yep. COVID was a classic fear reaction. It really wasn’t a whole lot different than humanity’s response to other historic plagues. Panic, government overreach, civil strife. All are common societal symptoms of disease outbreaks. People expect government to ‘do something’ in times of crisis and they did. Unfortunately, in such situations with limited and bad information, mistakes are quite likely. It didn’t help that China never cooperated and allowed any external investigation or even gave a completely honest accounting of what happened. They still haven’t and never will while the CCP is in power. I can forgive that initial reaction and the mistakes made through fall of 2020. The virus was entirely novel. How was anyone, including governments, supposed to know what it was going to do? Good science takes time, and scientists even today don’t understand a lot about COVID, like how it produced the many many different observed symptoms, why it is often asymptomatic, why some people develop long COVID, etc. I can forgive the initial fear reaction over the first few months. What I don’t forgive is dragging the lockdowns and other measures for years after, even after the initial threat of overwhelming health care systems had passed. That is less excusable. The COVID response transitioned from a fear reaction to something entirely political because politicians, ever a prideful lot, refused to admit they didn’t know what they were doing and determined to justify their actions however possible, while some even used it quite brazenly to advance other political agendas entirely.
Excellent and well argued riposte-a depth of knowledge that few have.Thank you…………….for the best laugh of the day so far and a reminder of the terrible price of ignorance and vanity
Don’t everyone’s eyes swivel? What a bummer if you had to fully turn your head every time you needed to look at something that wasn’t directly ahead and perpendicular to the line of sight of your locked-in-place eyeballs. Reading would be a nightmare, and as for playing sports, no chance whatsoever!
The former New York governor says that people no longer trust the government
Don’t worry; I’m sure the public’s level of trust in the government will improve now that you’re no longer in it.
Americans don’t trust the government? Shocking news there. Cuomo wonders why we don’t trust him and his ilk then casually laments the fact that he can’t actually force someone to close their private business. He’s basically admitting that he’s a tyrant who wants to take away personal freedom for the sake of ‘public safety’. He thinks Americans are so stupid they can’t connect the dots and figure that one out, and some are, but not enough for him to succeed, hence his frustration. America remains, despite considerable efforts by Cuomo and his ilk, a mostly free country. We should all thank the founding fathers. The system they set in place of power divided between different branches of government and between federal, state, and local authorities continues to frustrate potential tyrants over two hundred years hence. Moreover, the structures in place would be difficult to change and leverage toward a more centralized power even in times of broad public unity and high trust in government. In a polarized and divided America where states, cities, corporations, media, and citizen groups are all at each others throats over most issues, it’s difficult to even pass a budget and avoid a government shutdown. I don’t see Cuomo or anyone else getting the authority to send in the Gestapo to enforce pandemic lockdowns anytime soon. Maybe in some of the ultraliberal urban strongholds like San Francisco, Chicago, or NY but not at the level of any state or nationally.
That we basically wasted a once-in-a-lifetime naive compliant response, which we did mostly have universally initially, on a disease that simply wasn’t deadly enough to warrant it, was always something that concerned me as a potential major consequence of how we dealt with Covid.
There is yet another underappreciated danger in that it was indeed “extraordinary” that people “acted with…uniformity” because in many cases there was “no enforcement capacity”.
I think this, coupled with failing and flailing institutions run ever more ragged post-Covid, has taught many more people than realized it before that indeed many of the rules in society are merely based on the honour system and are never really going to be enforced. There are many people who are reacting accordingly.
It is unlikely that what used to be high-trust societies will ever be quite the same again in my lifetime, because we underappreciated how fragile they can be.
The latest figures globally, as of 6:30pm CEST, 16 August 2023, there have been 769,806,130 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,955,497 deaths, reported to WHO. Many from the 75 + age group but in the UK the figures show that in the age groups 30 – 39 it was 8.5 and in the group 40-49 it was 21 per 100,000. Your claim the disease wasn’t deadly enough seems a bit off.
The problem is that the numbers are bogus because no distinction was made between dying with (i.e. incidental) and dying from COVID. The fact of the matter is that for any healthy individual under the age of 50 (and probably under 70), the risk of death was infinitesimally small. No different from any other ILI.
I would suspect the vast majority of people in the younger age groups had underlying health issues.
That is a true and an extremely under-discussed aspect of all of this.
You may want to go back and review his record on moving elderly folks out of the hospital into nursing homes where they were less protected, and some carried the virus back there creating a tinderbox…he conveniently fails to discuss that in the interview
That’s correct. He also failed to mention his incessant whining about Trump for not providing 4000 ventilators tomorrow, and for not getting the hospital ship in place tomorrow (even though it went almost completely unused). The guy is a quintessential politician, blaming everyone else while taking no responsibility.
Watching him on CNN with his brother was nauseating.
He had no powers…. ? And then he imposed lockdowns? I don’t follow.
He knew that he had no real control over any enforcement mechanism. Here in Brooklyn the police were not interested, so we did pretty much what we wanted. Masking in stores was enforced socially; if you refused you eventually would have been “escorted” out by guys much bigger than you. You could call the police to report them. But, guess what, the police would not be interested.
I think he’s right – people won’t obey such rules as easily next time (on assumption such rules/guidance are issued).
But context is everything I suspect – if for example the next virus coming to your country is preceded by images of the dead stacked high and emergency services overwhelmed elsewhere then public fear will lead, one suspects, to most hunkering down again of their own volition. The anger may be turned on those who ‘may’ be spreading the virus but taking no precautionary measures. The ‘demands’ to do something may be v difficult for Govts. Sweden can offer some lessons, but it’s applicability in a Country ranked 91st in population density may have some limitations.
What we can certainly do is be much more ready in other ways – hospital capacity, equipment etc, and thus be potentially in a better place to absorb spikes in illness without crashing the whole system.
“What we can certainly do is be much more ready in other ways – hospital capacity, equipment etc, and thus be potentially in a better place to absorb spikes in illness without crashing the whole system.”
An excellent idea, but the healthcare conglomerates, the insurance companies, and many of the hospitals themselves would fight against that tooth and nail because excess capacity, be it in the form of inventory stocks or extra beds and extra staff, ultimately cuts into profitability, reducing the size of corporate bonuses, share price, dividends, etc. If you’re from the UK or somewhere else that has nationalized healthcare, that’s probably a good idea. Won’t work in America. As much as I dislike the idea of nationalized healthcare, the way America does it now is actually worse, because it manages to combine the worst aspects of a market system and a nationalized one. There’s still mountains of bureaucratic and regulatory nonsense to sift through, long wait times for specialists, etc, and all the things that national health systems have, plus all the bad incentives of a capitalist system to cut corners on things inventorys, excess capacity, and system resiliency for the sake of profit. On top of that, there’s also the insurance companies who make ridiculous profits and constantly lobby the corrupt government to further rig the system in their favor, all because the government doesn’t want to make hard political choices. They’d rather let the insurance companies continue to basically run the system and suck up all the money that should be paying for more hospitals, more doctors, and a more resilient healthcare system or staying in the pockets of the people. It would be difficult to purposefully design a less efficient or more corrupt system than what we have in the USA.
Yes an interesting point JS. The command and control systems just may be better able to drive macro decisions that provide sufficient flex capacity a little more.
But Governments do intervene in specific markets to ensure broader strategic resilience esp if a security issue. Energy storage being one. But I recognise that is a little simpler than healthcare emergency capacity.
The sad reality is Huchol, the governor who replaced Cuomo, is demonstrably worse than him.
And now he’s carping about a lack of trust in government? Well no shit, Sherlock.
When he dies, if there is a God and an afterlife, Cuomo will have to answer for the hundreds of people in nursing homes that he killed by requiring COVID patients be sent there.
Maybe he & the others shouldn’t have wasted the good will that was there early in the pandemic. In the earlier 2020 lots of people were on board with a short lockdown to give healthcare system a few days to regroup. But when it became a long lockdown for smaller businesses and churches, yet large stores were allowed to operate, and then the BLM protests were not just allowed but encouraged, naturally, the good will evaporated. Add to that how instead of the message and measures of healthy lifestyle, the government decided to push mandatory vaccination, all the censorship and smear campaigns that promoted it – and voila.
Try impossible.
A public health official that tries to impose a “lockdown” in my neck of the woods gets one reply “Pound sand and have a nice day”.
All these fools who trusted governments, and now, boo hoo, they don’t trust them. That is, previously, they bought pretty everything they were sold, and now they disbelieve everything. They’re only capable of binary positions. Nuance fries their wee heads.
Whereas an adult makes up his own mind in each case. Sometimes the govt lies, of course. It’d be worrying if they didn’t, given how excitable and prey to simple solutions too many people are. But occasionally govts do the right thing.
Instead of lurching from blanket trust to blanket distrust, how about making up your own mind in each instance?
Pathetic
What a peculiar article, builds this guy up then tears him down. Seems he’s been wrong on just about everything, including resistance to any future potential lockdowns since people tend to trust authority when they are afraid.
I agree. People do tend to trust authority when they are afraid.
Looking at your two comments, I’m not sure what you’re saying. Why are you against the Great Barrington Declaration?
Because it was completely wrong. A significantly greater number of people would have died with that approach. At least the government got that call right, although it was a week late.
The only people protected under govt lockdowns were those who could afford to isolate themselves. Lockdowns did nothing to protect vulnerable people living with family members who worked outside the home. Lockdowns were essentially useless.
How so given the results after 4 years in Sweden, who essentially took the path of the Great Barrington declaration. In the end the Swedes (despite initial major mistakes involving nursing homes, as was the case in NY and the UK) did better than anybody when one looks at excess deaths. And by the way, the 3 lead epidemiologists who wrote the Great Barrington declaration (Battacharya, Kuhldorf and Gupta) are hardly fringe (as stated by Collins and Fauci of the NIH/NIAID) and don’t work at fringe institutions (unless you consider Stanford, Harvard and Oxford as 3rd rate places).
By the way, you would do well to read the various Cochrane reviews (considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine) as well as Carl Henneghan of the Oxford Institute of Evidence Based Medicine. The truth is that the lockdowns did far more harm than good, masks simply did nothing to prevent spread or slow down spread (and offered absolutely no protection), and the vaccines were not effective for any significant period of time and had far more risks than benefits for anybody under the age of 65 (which is precisely why the UK, Australia and many European countries are not giving the new vaccine to anybody under 65).
I fully support the GBD.
People who remember COVID and the massive failures of government during that time will trust authority a lot less, and that’s what Cuomo was expressing with all his usual ‘we know what’s best’ condescension.
‘People tend to trust authority when they are afraid.’ Thanks Robbie for making our point for us, you’re the best.