Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo spent almost $453 million during the COVID-19 pandemic stockpiling medical equipment such as ventilators that have almost entirely gone unused, a damning new audit by the state comptroller found.
State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli found that only three items out of thousands purchased by the former governor’s office were ever sent out to hospitals, according to the report.
“New York state bought hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of medical equipment at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, including ventilators and x-ray machines, that now sits unused in storage facilities across the state, missing recommended maintenance and costing taxpayers storage expenses,” DiNapoli wrote in a statement.
The audit found that DOH’s stockpile, called the medical emergency response cache, grew from around 4,800 pieces of equipment before the pandemic, to 252,000 items now.
Of the roughly 248,000 pieces of equipment purchased during the pandemic, only three were ever deployed, the auditors found after reviewing databases supposed to keep track of the items.
The auditors also visited the warehouses and found some items were missing.
“DOH officials said that it was possible that they were put into use at some point and not recorded,” the report noted.
Despite a special committee within the DOH being charged with figuring out what to do with the stockpile in 2021, much of the equipment remains untouched and going to waste in state warehouses.
The auditors noted that the health department refused to provide documents providing details about how decisions were made about what to do with the stockpile.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment. --->READ MORE HERE
Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday brushed off a $450,000 taxpayer-funded settlement over sex-harass allegations against him — while suggesting his administration helped do the “impossible’’ to “save lives’’ during COVID.
“I said when it started from the beginning that [the sex lawsuit] was all political, and that’s the way it turned out,” Cuomo, 67, told The Post outside Calvary Baptist Church in Jamaica, Queens, where he had just delivered a brief address at the house of worship to mark Easter Sunday.
“I was dropped from the suit, so it was up to the state. The state did a settlement, which was basically settling a nuisance suit — sometimes it [costs] more to litigate than to settle. But it was all politics,” he said.
Asked for his thoughts about how New Yorkers must now foot the bill for the settlement, Cuomo responded, “That’s why you can’t politicize these things.
“If you start allowing political lawsuits and claims, then the taxpayers are gonna be paying a lot of money,” he said before wishing reporters a happy Easter and getting into the driver’s seat of a black Dodge.
Cuomo has persistently maintained his innocence against a slew of sexual-harassment claims.
Cuomo stepped down from office in August 2021 amid the sexual-harassment scandal and claims that his administration hid the true number of state nursing-home deaths involving COVID during the pandemic.
His administration was blamed for scores of COVID deaths because of its policy of moving infected patients into nursing homes, where some of the state’s most vulnerable population was, when hospitals became overcrowded.
The former governor, who is running for New York City mayor, told the church crowd Sunday that there is “too much negativity” these days — “too much us vs. them rather than we. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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