Cuomo’s family members said to get special access to testing
As the coronavirus pandemic swept through New York early last year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration arranged for his family members and other well-connected figures to have special access to state-administered coronavirus tests, according to three people with direct knowledge of the effort.
A top state doctor and other state health officials were dispatched to the homes of Cuomo’s family and friends to do the testing, and a state lab immediately processed the results, the people said.
This went on as average New Yorkers were struggling to get tested in the early days of the pandemic amid a scarcity of resources. Initially, the lab was only capable of running several hundred tests a day for a state with 19 million residents.
The use of state resources to benefit people close to the governor raises serious ethical questions, experts said. New York law prohibits state officials from using their positions to secure privileges for themselves or others.
Administration officials declined to comment on Cuomo family members getting testing priority, citing laws protecting health privacy. Officials said home tests were provided to members of the public in communities that were hard hit.
“We should avoid insincere efforts to rewrite the past. In the early days of this pandemic, when there was a heavy emphasis on contact tracing, we were absolutely going above and beyond to get people testing — including in some instances going to people’s homes — and door to door in places like New Rochelle — to take samples from those believed to have been exposed to COVID in order to identify cases and prevent additional ones,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said in a statement.
“Among those we assisted were members of the general public, including legislators, reporters, state workers and their families who feared they had contracted the virus and had the capability to further spread it,” he added.
The revelation of the testing program comes as the Cuomo administration is battling controversies on multiple fronts, including an investigation by the state attorney general into allegations of sexual harassment by the governor, which he has denied, and a federal inquiry into the state’s reporting of COVIDlinked deaths in nursing homes.
Among those who benefited from the priority testing program was Cuomo’s brother Chris, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 in late March of 2020. The CNN anchor was swabbed by a top New York Department of Health doctor, who visited his Hamptons home to collect samples from him and his family, the people with knowledge of the matter said.
Chris Cuomo and CNN spokesman Matt Dornic declined to comment.
The same doctor, Eleanor Adams, now a top adviser to the state health commissioner, also was enlisted to test multiple other Cuomo family members, according to two people familiar with the program.
The people said the test specimens were rushed — at times driven by state troopers — to a state public health lab in Albany and processed immediately. At times, employees in the state lab were kept past their shifts until late into the night to process results of those close to Cuomo, two people said.
The specimens were shrouded in secrecy, marked only by initials or numbers. Results then were provided to the family members, the people with knowledge of the matter said.
The operations troubled some administration officials, who believed that it was an improper use of resources that helped those with influence over average New Yorkers, according to the people.
Adams didn’t respond to requests for comment, but officials with knowledge of the effort said she was simply carrying out orders.
Separately, nurses working for the state were dispatched in twoperson swabbing teams to test “dozens” of VIPs, some living in penthouses in Manhattan, one person said.
“We referred to them as ‘specials,’ ” the person said.