The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences issued a statement on Tuesday indicating it had rescinded a special Emmy award given to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his COVID briefings giving that he resigned from office in disgrace.
In a brief statement on Tuesday, the Academy cited the release of the report from the state attorney general’s office that concluded Cuomo was a serial sexual harasser.
“His name and any reference to his receiving the award will be eliminated from International Academy materials going forward,” the organization stated.
“The Governor’s 111 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows, with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure,” the Academy’s President & CEO Bruce L. Paisner said in the statement announcing the award that remained on the group’s website on Tuesday. “People around the world tuned in to find out what was going on, and New York tough became a symbol of the determination to fight back.”
No mention was made of the 15,000 or more seniors Cuomo killed after he issued an order sticking COVID positive patients in nursing homes, exposing the virus to the most at-risk population.
At the time he received the award, Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean slammed Cuomo for “profiting off the deaths of our loved ones” from COVID-19.
Dean believes Cuomo’s response to the pandemic led to the deaths of both of her in-laws and thousands of other nursing home residents. However, the Democrat governor has refused to be transparent or take responsibility for the high death rate in his state.
Instead, he has praised himself repeatedly for his leadership during the crisis. Then news broke that Cuomo would receive an Emmy Award for “his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.”
“While he accepts his award, many of us just accepted caskets and urns of our loved ones,” Dean responded then.
Fighting back tears, she said her family and many others will not have their loved ones to celebrate Thanksgiving with this year.
“It’s just a reminder of the people that we lost, partly because of his leadership,” Dean said. “I want the governor to know that when he accepts his award for leadership skills, we are going to be mourning them and missing them this Thanksgiving season… I think he loves to be a celebrity. And if he really wants to be a celebrity, then go to Hollywood.”
Cuomo’s March order requiring nursing homes to take coronavirus patients has been widely considered to be disastrous because it placed potentially contagious COVID-19 patients with those most vulnerable to the virus: the elderly and people with disabilities.
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Cuomo has refused to take responsibility for the order or the high death numbers in New York. His state has the highest coronavirus death count and the second highest death rate in the U.S. According to NBC News, as of Friday, New York had 34,919 reported deaths.
Officially, New York reported more than 6,700 deaths at nursing homes due to the coronavirus. However, the state tally only includes people who died at the facility; nursing home residents who were transferred to hospitals and died there are not included in the total.
Times Union columnist Chris Churchill, the Associated Press and others believe the number is a “significant undercount.”
“The state is hiding the truth in other words – perhaps to make a controversial March 25 order requiring that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients appear less catastrophic than it really was,” Churchill wrote in late October.
ProPublica, a left-leaning investigative news publication, also criticized the Democrat governor for releasing a book praising himself for his handling of the virus while failing to be transparent about the nursing home deaths.
“Cuomo’s new book on leadership, published as the pandemic continues to ravage America, touts his willingness to speak hard truths about the pandemic,” it wrote. “Why then has he still not said how many nursing home residents perished on his watch?”
In response, Cuomo claimed the state and federal investigations into his handling of the pandemic are merely “political.”
However, the New York state legislature is controlled by Cuomo’s own Democratic Party. And numerous news outlets, not just conservative ones, have reported about the problem, including Cuomo’s lack of transparency.
Dean has been a leading critic of Cuomo after both her in-laws died from the coronavirus in March in assisted living and nursing home facilities in New York.
Like so many others, Dean said she wants to know why the governor put vulnerable nursing home patients at risk, why he did not use the other makeshift hospitals for COVID-19 patients instead and why the state still has not released the total number of nursing-home deaths linked to the virus.
“This is not political. It’s about accountability @NYGovCuomo,” she wrote on Twitter. “We won’t stop.”
