Brownstone Institute
Governor Andrew Cuomo: From Hero to Goofball in One Seasonal Virus
Oh joy, another book by a hero of lockdowns! This time it is from Andrew Cuomo, who rode the disease-panic wave to the heights during the confusion of Spring 2020 before falling to the depths a year later. The adoring crowds, the fawning media, the enthralled masses all went away in a seeming flash, entirely due to some alleged untoward romantic gestures about which some complained.
Cuomo accomplished the deed and then was thrown to the dogs. He went from angel to devil practically overnight. One day he was saving New York from Covid – surely he will soon be president! – and the next he was waking up with nothing to do but look over his royalty checks.
Let us see what he has to say in his memoir. The book was written when he was at the height of his fame, but then withdrawn by the publisher when he crashed to the ground. But as it happens, there are contracts and advances and royalties at stake, so here we are now: American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic. The tone is confident, aggressive, sure-footed, and completely wrong.
We know for sure that he will not admit to having abused his power, personally or politically. He will not say that he had any part in wrecking New York, its commercial culture, its citizens’ sense of self-worth, or its religious freedoms. He will nowhere say that he went too far. He will not admit that he was a craven media tool or that he followed the mania in order to position himself for higher office. He will say none of that, any more than the rest of them have said that.
What does he say? Well, the book is more self-effacing than I expected, even disarming. He tells a good story concerning his personal life and struggles. It seems even sincere, and readers can connect with his professional rise then fall then rise again…and his subsequent fall again. His ideology is on display to the max: a progressive who believes strongly in government in its ideal but is always disappointed in its practice.
But the book is also strange for what it takes for granted, namely that locking down is the proper path to deal with infectious disease. Viruses in all times and places arrive, infect some portion of the population depending on prevalence, bear responsibility for the death of others, and eventually become endemic, which is to say, something we live with. This one was no different in any of its properties. What made this one different was its politicization and the casual but universally held view that life itself had to be fundamentally disrupted by government because of it.
Cuomo himself sneaks this presumption in from the start:
An airborne virus was one of the nightmare scenarios envisioned as a terrorist plot. It is easy to create chaos and overwhelm society with fear when people are afraid to breathe the air. There would be no good news with this virus and no good outcome. Schools and businesses would be closed. The economy would suffer. People would die. Nothing we could do would be enough. There was no possibility for victory, and even FDR and Churchill had at least the possibility of a successful outcome.
Really? No good outcome at all? Failure was baked in? Also, what is this passing mention of schools and businesses being forced to close? That did not happen in South Dakota, Sweden, Nicaragua, or Belarus. Why this concession to massive coercion when such had never been done in past pandemics? Where does this come from? And why did the governor just toss that in there? Why did he never rethink in the midst of his most egregious actions?
Keep in mind that he put this book to bed in the fall of 2020, just before his resignation following his call to open up New York. Here he writes that he defeated the virus. “New York State, a microcosm of the nation, has shown a path forward. We have seen government mobilize to handle the crisis. We have seen Americans come together in a sense of unity to do the impossible. We have seen how the virus is confronted and defeated.”
Remarkable. Consider the following two charts.
What these charts show is what one might have expected from any new virus of this sort with this risk profile. It killed. Then it infected more. Then 99.8% of those infected shook it off and obtained an upgraded immune system, no thanks to the vaccine that stopped neither infection nor spread. Then life got back to normal. Every bit of this trajectory was easily predictable regardless of what government did or did not do.
The virus did not need Cuomo to battle it: the human immune system does the hard work and governments are mere spectators. Public health knew that for decades until suddenly they did not. The temptation to be a hero was too great for vast numbers of people holding public office, Cuomo among them.
What government did was wreck much more than was necessary in the name of doing something. What’s worse is that the things government did reversed the higher-level knowledge that the one group that needed protection from the virus was the vulnerable population, in this case, the elderly and infirm.
Cuomo, on the other hand, signed an order, replicated in many other states, to force nursing homes to accept Covid patients in the extra rooms. No choice. They had to. This led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. More on that in a moment.
On lockdowns, Cuomo simply bakes into the prose the idea that they had to happen. They began in New Rochelle, NY.
“No one was ready to accept that they needed to change how they were living…. As we saw in Westchester that day, local parochial concerns would butt up against major, wide-ranging changes that had to occur in order to combat the virus. As we were instituting this lockdown on New Rochelle, one Democratic assemblywoman who represented Westchester came to my office demanding a meeting; then she simply sat in the second row at a press conference and scowled at me.”
And that’s it: lockdown is the whole scheme. He never doubts it, never even argues for it.
The day after our first COVID case, the legislature passed the law giving the governor emergency powers to handle the crisis. If the legislature had not passed the law, I would not have had the power to do what I would soon do. There would be no executive order closing businesses or schools, no order requiring masks or social distancing. … The law was smart, and it has proven successful.
Now, let’s just jump ahead to the great nursing home scandal. I was curious what Cuomo had to say. I will just quote him.
By early spring, Republicans needed an offense to distract from the narrative of their botched federal response—and they needed it badly. So they decided to attack Democratic governors and blame them for nursing home deaths…. The Trump forces had a simple line: “Thousands died in nursing homes.” It was true. But they needed to add a conspiracy, which was that they died because of a bad state policy that “mandated and directed” that the nursing homes accept COVID-positive people, and these COVID-positive people were the cause of the spread of the disease in the nursing homes. It was a lie. New York State never demanded or directed that any nursing home accept a COVID-positive patient.”
That’s fascinating because I’m almost sure that I saw such an order. I look at the New York State website and it has been taken down. I found it on the Internet Archive. It is on New York State letterhead.
It reads as follows:
COVID-19 has been detected in multiple communities throughout New York State. There is an urgent need to expand hospital capacity in New York State to be able to meet the demand for patients with COVID-19 requiring acute care. As a result, this directive is being issued to clarify expectations for nursing homes (NHs) receiving residents returning from hospitalization and for NHs accepting new admissions…. No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.
Oh. So it wasn’t a lie after all. And anyone can check this. Read the above. That certainly sounds like New York State directed nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients. Denying that he did this amounts to pettifoggery over terms. The import was perfectly obvious. Why not just admit that he made a mistake?
I’m tempted to end this review there. But it actually gets worse. At one point, Cuomo writes that his heroics actually worked and that this is obvious. He is or was a completely unrepentant lockdower:
States like Arizona, Florida, and Texas that followed Trump’s demands to reopen quickly saw increased infection rates and needed to close their economies back down—reopening only to re-close. As a result, the financial markets were distressed with the volatility in these states. This stood in stark contrast to New York, where as of this writing 75 percent of our economy is open and our infection rate has been consistently 1 percent or below for nearly three months and among the lowest in the nation. It is incomprehensible that people still support Trump’s disproven theories. The states that most closely followed Trump’s “guidance” were doing the worst.
Look again at the charts above. The virus was only getting started when he turned in this text. He wrote those words during a seasonal downturn. Infections were still coming and coming in wave after wave. New York fared as bad as any state, certainly far worse than Florida or other open states. Meanwhile, New York drove residents out, and the state is in far worse economic condition than most.
And yet here he is taking credit for an intelligent and hands-on approach that wrecked the lives, liberties, and property of residents of the state, who, to this day, have yet to regain their composure. He did this. He became famous and beloved for it. And to this day, based on this book, he still believes that he was right.
Cuomo can’t imagine – truly – that he might have done anything wrong except perhaps communicated more clearly. In truth, governments could have forced everyone to paint their faces bright blue and wear frying pans for shoes and it would not have changed the pandemic outcome from what it was going to be. The virus never cared. But don’t tell that to Cuomo: the upshot of his book is that he saved New York. Nothing will convince him otherwise.
In short, don’t read this book looking for an apology. These politicians all panicked, as John Tamny argued from the beginning. No matter the policy, the pandemic was going to recede into memory, as it has. No matter how badly this class of politicians performed, somehow they all managed to claim to have done the right thing, and to earn royalties on their ghost-written accounts of their genius.
Even given everything, the book is not all bad. His personal stories are self effacing and engaging. He is a real person with a real life, with choices to make, risks to take, difficulties to face, family struggles, and so on. He was free to engage life to its fullest in 2020, unlike the 20 million people he locked down and robbed of all such opportunities. He believed that it was the right thing to do because Fauci was saying that it was. It was not in fact the right thing to do.
I would like to end by echoing Cuomo’s tribute to those who were shoved out in front to face the virus while the laptoppers languished at home in hiding. He is exactly right to say the following:
The heroes who made this happen were the working families of New York. When we were in our moment of need, we called on the blue-collar New Yorkers to show up for everyone. We needed them to come to work and risk their health so that so many of us could stay safely at home. These are the people who have received the fewest rewards from society but from whom we now asked the most.
These are the people who would have been most justified in refusing our call. They were not the rich and the well-off. They were not the highly paid. They have not been given anything more than they deserved. They had no obligation to risk their health and the health of their families. But they did it simply because “it was the right thing to do.” But for some that is enough. For some that is everything.
These heroes are the people who live in places like Queens, where I grew up. These are the people working hard to better themselves and their families. These are parents concerned first and foremost with protecting their families, but who still showed up every day as nurses, National Guard members, train operators, bus drivers, hospital workers, police officers, grocery store employees, food delivery drivers. They are Puerto Ricans, Haitians, African Americans, Dominicans, Asians, Guatemalans. These are the immigrants who love America, who make America, and who will fight for it.
These are the heroes of this battle. When COVID began, I felt it was unfair to call on them to carry such a heavy burden. I feared I would put them in harm’s way. But we didn’t have an option if society was to function. We needed food, hospitals, and electricity to stay alive.
All through this difficult endeavor there was never a moment when these people refused to show up or leveraged more benefits for themselves. At the beginning of a battle no one knows who will actually survive. Courage is determined by the willingness to enter the field. No one knew that when we started, the infection rate among our essential workers would be no higher than the general community infection rate. They have my undying admiration and the gratitude of every true New Yorker.
We can only say to that: Amen! These people do deserve deep gratitude. They also deserve a government that will never again conscript them to go to work for the professional class in order that the well-to-do can keep clean and free of pathogens. That the people Cuomo rightly celebrates were so treated is a violation of the social contract, and now have every reason to be bitter. And don’t you love the comment that “We needed food, hospitals, and electricity to stay alive?” Who exactly is “we” here?
We know. We know all too well.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Information disorder is a term coined in 2017 in a report titled “Information Disorder Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking” that was drafted for the Council of Europe. (Derakhshan & Hossein, 2017). Information disorder refers to the sharing or developing of false information, categorized as misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Of interest, the original 2016 election of President Trump triggered the commission of this report.
From the report:
This concept has been further developed by think tanks, academics, NGOs, governments, and others now invested in the vast fact-checking and industrial-censorship complex. We have all become well-versed in these concepts over the past few years.
A 2020 peer-reviewed study took this concept further and made information disorder into a mental health condition.
Abstract:
Many of us may be unknowingly suffering from information disorder syndrome. It is more prevalent due to the digitized world where the information flows to every individual’s phone, tablet and computer in no time. Information disorder syndrome is the sharing or developing of false information with or without the intent of harming and they are categorized as misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.
The severity of the syndrome is categorized into three grades. Grade 1 is a milder form in which the individual shares false information without the intent of harming others. Grade 2 is a moderate form in which the individual develops and shares false information with the intent of making money and political gain, but not with the intent of harming people. Grade 3 is a severe form in which the individual develops and shares false information with the intent of harming others.
The management of this disorder requires the management of false information, which is rumor surveillance, targeted messaging and community engagement.
Repeated sufferers at the Grade 1 level, all sufferers from Grade 2 and 3 levels need psycho-social counseling and sometimes require strong regulations and enforcement to control such information disorder.
The most critical intervention is to be mindful of the fact that not all posts in social media and news are real, and need to be interpreted carefully.
From this paper, the idea of “information disorder syndrome” quickly jumped into the lexicon of both the censorship-industrial complex and the mental health industry. It is important to note that the terms syndrome, disease, and mental disorders are often used interchangeably. In this case, it has been determined by organizations such as First Draft and the Aspen Institute that the way to cure this syndrome is to stop the flow of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation online.
Is it just a matter of time before the American Psychiatric Association puts this new “syndrome” into the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)?
Is this a possibility?
The American Psychological Association is at least considering how to fit “information disorder” or even “information disorder syndrome” into their modalities. The APA has developed a consensus statement report on fighting health misinformation, which we taxpayers paid for. The CDC paid the APA $2 million for this project.
Next up will be the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) developing a funding program to research how to cure or manage this new mental health disorder; considered a new syndrome because of the pernicious tendrils of the internet.
As information disorder syndrome is not a formally recognized mental health condition yet, so far, specific NIMH funding has been absent. However, suppose information disorder syndrome continues to evolve by the medical establishment into a mental health condition. In that case, it is conceivable that NIMH could support studies in the future, particularly for the “sufferers from grade 2 and 3 levels who need psycho-social counseling and sometimes require strong regulations and enforcement to control such information disorder.”
This is yet another example of how the government can and has previously exerted control over individuals. What happens when the APA stigmatizes people who have contrarian views or lifestyles or posts mis, dis or mal-information repeatedly online? The APA has a long history of discriminating and labeling categories of people who differ from the norm, such as when being gay became a mental health disorder in the 1950s.
This lasted for decades, and the APA endorsed many medical treatments such as surgical interventions, including castrations, vasectomies, hysterectomies, and lobotomies, drug therapies (including aversion therapy, which included inducing nausea, vomiting, or paralysis when exposed to same-sex erotic images or thoughts) and even chemical castration, sexual depressants and stimulants, LSD, estrogen and testosterone and also electroconvulsive therapy—which involved administering electric shocks to patients.
Taking this back to the topic at hand, making information disorder a syndrome affecting the individual allows the state through the medical and insurance industries to step in and force the individual to conform to societal norms. As shown in the example above, this is within the realm of possibilities.
Is this a future that is going to happen? Who knows, but it could. And we have to be prepared for this future manifesting in various planning stages. This is why terms such as “information disorder” and “information disorder syndrome” are being propagated throughout new media and must be rejected at all levels.
”Free speech is the most pragmatic tool we have for ascertaining truth. Only by examining all sides of an issue can the truth be chiseled out like a statue out of marble. But the underlying reality is that there can be many truths; we each have our own experiences, values, mores, and life. That is the beauty and wonder of being an individual. There can be no free speech without free and open access to ideas, knowledge, truths, and untruths. Without free speech, we are little more than slaves.
We must defend all speech—whether untrue, hateful, or intolerable, as that is the only way to protect our rights and abilities to understand the world. As soon as free speech is restricted, that restriction will be used to sway public opinion. As soon as one person can be defined as a heretic for uttering words, then soon everyone opposing the “officially approved” side of an issue will be labeled as a heretic. The next logical step will be for the state to define acts of heresy as criminal offenses. As soon as governments and those in power can sway public opinion by restricting free speech, democracy and even our republic of United States will be lost.”
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Part of the sweep of government in the first days of the Trump administration has been a freeze on communications. The explosion has hit the whole of public health bureaucracies, which Trump personally blames in part for the meltdown of his previous term of president in his last year. The pause in operations is designed to figure out exactly what is going on.
It is certainly not the case that Donald Trump wants you to die, contrary to Paul Krugman’s claim. No longer writing at the New York Times, he reserved his rather extreme view for his Substack account.
Recall that Krugman was 100 percent for lockdowns and all the rest including the fake science behind vaccine mandates. While most of the world was in cages, he was proclaiming the dawn of the great reset. With that reversed, he has reverted to form.
What actually seems to be dying the death is the public health bureaucracy.
As the Wall Street Journal explained in their story headlined “Swaths of U.S. Government Grind to a Halt After Trump Shock Therapy:” “While glitches aren’t uncommon during the early days of presidential transitions, some longtime federal employees said the chaos seemed more extreme this week due in part to wide-spanning differences between the agendas of the previous administration and the new one. The stalled initiatives extended far beyond Trump’s cancellation of federal DEI programs.”
I seriously doubt that public opinion registers much concern.
Let’s take a look at the actions of these agencies in the pre-inauguration days before the freeze.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced on January 17, three days before the inauguration, a jaw-dropping $590 million grant to Moderna, a driving force behind global vaccination with mRNA shots during Covid. The announcement of this grant changed the fortunes of the company’s stock price, which had been in a two-year slide.
The timing alone cries out for explanation. Was this to dump largess on the deep-state partner before Trump could stop it? Or was it tacitly approved by the incoming administration in order to keep Trump’s fingerprints from it? We’ll know based on whether this goes ahead. It will certainly be a test of the agency’s future under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., provided he is confirmed by the Senate.
For now, it has all the earmarks of an old regime grabbing whatever it can on the way out.
Over at the CDC, which exists as part of a suite of agencies under the control of HHS, we have one last communication dating also from January 17. It was to announce the “first-ever National One Health Framework to Address Zoonotic Diseases and Advance Public Health Preparedness in the United States.”
David Bell at Brownstone has been writing about this for longer than a year. As he describes it:
“Those pushing it envision a world in which any lifeform is considered intrinsically equal worth to others. If you must choose between your daughter and a rat, the choice should weigh the probability of survival of each, or may do the least harm to other lifeforms after being saved. Within this ‘equitable’ worldview, humans become a pollutant. Ever-growing human populations have driven other species to extinction through environmental change, from the megafauna of ancient Australasia to the plummeting insect populations of modern Europe. Humans become a plague upon the earth, and their restriction, impoverishment, and death may therefore be justified for a greater good.”
The connection here to Fauci et al, and their view concerning spillover diseases from animals to humans – a major reason why they were so insistent on the zoonotic origins of Covid – is rather obvious.
In the middle of the worst part of US lockdowns, Fauci and his co-author David Morens wrote an article for Cell in which they explain that the real problem with life on earth began 12,000 years ago when “human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops. These beginnings of domestication were the earliest steps in man’s systematic, widespread manipulation of nature.”
It’s always with the same theme. If there were fewer of us, had we never had much contact with each other, if we never dared to cultivate crops, domestic animals, store water, and move around, we could have been spared all diseases.
The real problem is what we call civilization itself, which is why the article ends with an assault on “overcrowding in dwellings and places of human congregation (sports venues, bars, restaurants, beaches, airports), as well as human geographic movement,” all of which “catalyzes disease spread.”
The only solution, in this view, is “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
One Health, as newly embraced by the CDC, amounts to a radical transformation of the basis of social order itself, under the guidance of god-like scientists who alone know how to structure the best life for all living things, even if that comes at the expense of human flourishing.
David Bell describes this creepy strain of belief as a “cult” but it might also be described as an ideology very different from the dominant ones in the 20th century. Socialism might have proven unworkable but at least it aspired to the improvement of human life. Capitalist ideology was the same. This is something different, with more in common with the far-flung imaginings of Rousseau or the Prophet Mani who shared in common the belief that all attempts to create what we call civilization are inherently corrupting of our perfect state of nature.
This was part of the underlying philosophical infrastructure of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, not merely a public health establishment doing crazy things that happened to be captured by high-powered industrial interests. There was a dreamy and ultimately ghastly utopianism backing all of these actions, stemming from hot-house salons of government-funded science cabals where they not only refuse to speak to normal people; they have nothing but disdain for the aspirations of the common folk and their attachments to property, family, and tradition (which includes, for example, home remedies on dealing with infectious disease).
How it came to be that our main engines of public health came to be captured in whole by such a crazed ideology would require a deep and expansive investigation. Certainly, it happened gradually and largely out of the public eye, so much so that even our best investigative writers are still trying to wrap their brains around it all. Whatever this ideology is, it captured nearly the entire planet Earth in the years 2020-2023 or thereabouts and resulted in a health crisis without precedent in modern times.
Part of the result of that grand experiment was the unseating of a variety of populist leaders in the US, UK, and Brazil. This seems to have set in motion what Walter Kirn has called “a coup against a coup,” as the astonishing avalanche of executive orders reveals. The flurry of news – including a full reaffirmation of free speech, a purge of all DEI edicts, a deletion of previous dictates on Central Bank Digital Currencies, and a full hiring freeze in the federal government – has been so massive that the pundit class has been left gasping to stay on top of it all.
As for NIH, Jay Bhattacharya has been tagged to head the agency. As he awaits Senate confirmation, the acting head is Dr. Matthew Memoli, an award-winning vaccinologist who has worked at NIH for 16 years. In defiance of the regime, he argued in 2021 that “with existing vaccines, blanket vaccination of people at low risk of severe illness could hamper the development of more-robust immunity gained across a population from infection.”
Our own Fellow Bret Swanson took note of this one dissident within the Fauci ranks and celebrated his resolve to speak truth to power, in a complete takedown of evil four years ago. The doctor came under fire for daring to disagree.
Now Dr. Memoli heads the agency he defied. He remains in that position until the man once called a “fringe epidemiologist” by the previous head of NIH takes full control. This is as close to revolution and counterrevolution as you will find in a democratic society.
Something big and potentially wonderful is happening in the realm of public health, which was deployed for egregious purposes only a few years ago. It is a turning point of some sort, and one can hope that the results are consistent with the health, well-being, and freedom of everyone.
For now, there doesn’t seem to be too much in the way of public panic about the big freeze at HHS-related agencies, much less the removal of Anthony Fauci’s expensive security detail.
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