New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s publisher is pulling back promotion for his book on pandemic leadership after the launch of an inquiry into the scandal-ridden governor’s falsification of data to cover for his deadly nursing home policy last year.
The book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” according to the New York Times on Monday, had already began to suffer a severe decline in sales as the governor, who once stood as a rapidly rising Democratic star, fell embroiled in scandals over his handling of nursing home data combined with new allegations of sexual misconduct from nearly half a dozen women.
Gillian Blake of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House which published the book, reportedly told the Times the company had “no plans” to reprint Cuomo’s pandemic manifesto or reissue it in paperback over “the ongoing investigation into N.Y.S. reporting of COVID-related fatalities in nursing homes.”
The publisher did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s inquiry.
The FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are now investigating Cuomo after reports surfaced that the Cuomo administration manipulated nursing home data to show the governor handled the crisis better than others.
New data was made public in February following a report from New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James that implied Cuomo had severely undercounted the number of nursing home deaths to cover for a now-infamous March 25 policy that forced COVID-stricken patients into elderly care facilities. The data was released to the public after a court battle over a Freedom of Information Act case brought by the conservative think tank Empire Center.
New reporting from the New York Times out last week accuses top Cuomo aids of rewriting a Health Department report last year as Cuomo prepared to strike a book deal. Cuomo had been under consistent scrutiny from political adversaries and conservative media alike ever since the nursing home policy was implemented, even as legacy outlets promoted the New York governor as a pandemic hero. The same outlets throughout last year vilified Republican governors who steered their states through the public health crisis without the draconian lockdowns and deadly nursing home policies aggressively pursued by Cuomo.
While the state initially reported just shy of 6,500 COVID deaths in nursing homes, the number omitted patients infected in nursing homes who later died in hospitals. Times reporting suggests the true toll is more than 9,000, a number hidden from the public last summer.
“Four days after the report’s publication, Mr. Cuomo said publicly for the first time in a radio interview on July 10 that he was thinking about writing a book. By that point, he had already begun to seek permission from a state oversight agency to earn outside income from book sales,” the Times reported. “The book was not formally announced until the next month. It hit shelves in October and was quickly declared a best seller.”
