Now that Andrew Cuomo has gone down in the annals of New York State history as one of the most disgraced and corrupt governors that Empire State has ever encountered, we must ask ourselves who aided and abetted the governor in his nefarious schemes.

While many believe that Cuomo’s ignominious end was the result of unfettered sexual misconduct with female government employees, the truth is the Covid nursing home scandal was the lynch pin in Cuomo’s political demise.

To digress just a bit, it is noteworthy to mention that just today, NY Governor Kathy Hochul reported that the exact count of those who died of the Covid virus in the state was actually an additonal12,000 people than Cuomo and his team reported.  Fox News indicated that New York now reports nearly 55,400 people have died of Covid-19 in the state based on death certificate data submitted to the CDC. That number is up from about 43,400 that Cuomo had reported to the public as of Monday, his last day in office.

In January, a report was released that found that Cuomo and his team of corrupt lackeys had intentionally fudged the numbers of those nursing home residents whose lives were snuffed out by the Covid virus. The report scrutinized the March 25, 2020 order from Cuomo and company that mandated that nursing homes accept Covid patients from hospitals.

In his feckless attempt to cover up the truth about this lethal decision to transfer Covid patients to nursing homes, where the most vulnerable in our population reside, Cuomo ended up affording himself enough rope to which to politically put the last nail in his own coffin,

Yet and still, it was not the singular efforts by Cuomo to manipulate the truth for his own benefit that caused this. There were other people who were directly complicit in this mass murder and their roles cry out to be probed intensely.

Cuomo’s good friend and compatriot was the state’s health commissioner, Howard Zucker. This scandal also taints his reputation as the state’s top doc. Zucker and others of his ilk had complete knowledge of the fact that state health data was intentionally manipulated by the political influence of Cuomo. In any other setting and circumstance this would have been an irreparable breach of trust that the people of New York placed in him but during a deadly pandemic of this nature, such shenanigans classifies this as a callous crime against humanity.

Essentially, Zucker allowed the health department in which he charged with leading to morph into an accomplice in the pernicious agenda of Cuomo.

Tragically, these egregious antics did not stop here. In 2020, it was reported that Cuomo’s coterie were given permission to rewrite the state health department’s report on the nursing homes and thusly, the facts were significantly altered.

The modifications in the report sparked rancorous dialogue between Cuomo loyalists and experts in the health field who were naturally fuming at the thought of state collected data becoming political fodder.

The intractable conflict that erupted in the immediate aftermath of the revised report was inextricably tied to the fact that high-ranking officials in the health department had no choice but to tender their resignations. This included the announcement that the deputy commissioner for public health and the director of the bureau of communicable disease were leaving their positions.

The question remains as to why Zucker basically decided to lie down and play dead while allowing “Team Cuomo” to take hold of their own version of the narrative. Why didn’t Zucker pipe up in protest? Was he intimidated by Cuomo’s now-infamous bullying tactics? Was he afraid that blackmail might be next?

Was this a premeditated and diabolical scheme to enrich nursing home owners to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars? How much money does each nursing home make when they take in additional patients? Were these nursing home owners the same folks who consistently donated quite generously to Cuomo’s previous campaigns?

Zucker is a doctor who took an oath to save people’s lives, not to hasten their demise and that mantra should have been the one that guided him through this reprehensible morass.

Let’s not forget that Cuomo wielded unchecked power and influence and that was evidenced when the now former governor’s family and friends received special Covid testing at the beginning of the pandemic when ordinary people could not get a test.  It has been reported that it was state health officials who were the ones sent out to administer these tests.

Again, Cuomo may have been the ringleader here but it was Zucker who was complicit. A recent report in the Washington Post and quoted in an op-ed in the Times-Union newspaper stated that “Dr. Eleanor Adams, an epidemiologist and special advisor to Zucker, was sent to Chris Cuomo’s home in the Hamptons to test the gubernatorial brother at a time when other New Yorkers struggled to obtain coronavirus tests.”

The WaPo reported that when “her time wasn’t being wasted on such errands, Adams was tasked with coordinating testing issues for nursing homes and other high-risk settings.”

So, there you have it folks.  At a critical time in which the elderly who reside in nursing homes needed protection, state health officials were pandering to Cuomo’s odious nepotism and helping his family receive Covid tests while other “regular people” were dropping like flies. Talk about a sense of entitlement.

More to the point, the reputation and whatever integrity the health department had is  now history. This department, under the leadership of Zucker abysmally failed the people of New York during its darkest hour and its most frightening moment.

For whatever reason, Zucker decided to play along with this sickening canard; thinking only of himself and how he could benefit without giving the slightest thought to those who lost their lives as well as their grief stricken families.

Howard Zucker, you MUST resign. You must come clean to the people of New York and acknowledge your corrupt ways. The people of New York who pay your salary will demand no less.