Embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's catastrophic failure surrounding the state's growing nursing home scandal represents a permanent stain on a legacy tainted with deceit, chaos and thousands of deaths, critics are saying -- and he could be taking his younger brother down with him.

Cuomo's nursing home controversy came under renewed focus last week when his top aide admitted that his administration had withheld the true number of COVID-19 related deaths at nursing homes to avoid federal scrutiny, as first reported by the New York Post.

The state was forced to acknowledge a death toll among nursing home residents that reached close to 15,000 after initially reporting 8,500 -- a figure that excluded residents who died in a hospital.

Cuomo's directive for nursing homes to accept patients who had or were suspected of having COVID-19 has since been deemed "one of the biggest scandals of the pandemic." The decision created an onslaught of COVID-19 cases that infected a large part of the state's elderly patients and resulted in thousands of deaths among its most vulnerable population.

But as New York residents began to raise questions over the surging death toll in senior care facilities, the governor's little brother and most ardent protector, Chris Cuomo, offered him a platform on his CNN show, "Cuomo Prime Time," to appeal to viewers by conducting playful on-air conversations, largely avoiding the nursing home scandal entirely.

"This isn't just a government scandal. It's a media scandal," New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz wrote in a recent column. "For while the Cuomo administration was sentencing seniors to death, the media was busy fawning over Cuomo in a series of softball interviews, many of them conducted by his own brother."

As grieving New Yorkers angrily awaited answers, the Cuomo brothers joked on air about trivial matters, wondering aloud which of the two would be considered their mother’s favorite child and even resorting to physical comedy when the CNN anchor presented a cartoonishly oversized cotton swab for his brother to use for a coronavirus test.

Days after the elder Cuomo reversed course and signed an executive order on May 11 stopping hospitals from sending infected patients back to nursing homes and ramping up testing for staff, he appeared on his brother’s show for a 25-minute sit-down that made no mention of the nursing home death toll.

The CNN a... (Read more)