Opinion - They calculated that New York nursing home families would move on. They were wrong.

by Vivian Zayas, opinion contributor

There is a calculation that powerful people sometimes make when the victims of their decisions are elderly. It goes like this: the families will grieve, the news cycle will move on, and if you wait long enough, time does the work that accountability never had to. For six years, the families of over 15,000 New Yorkers who died in nursing homes have been proving that calculation wrong.

In a letter issued this month, Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) wrote to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche demanding an answer to a question that should not require a congressional letter: what is the status of the criminal referral against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo?

That a letter was necessary tells you everything about where we are.

Every person in a nursing home is someone's mother. Someone's father. Someone's grandmother. They are not abstractions. They are people with histories, with families, with someone who loved them. People who needed care they could not get at home, and who trusted that the system governing that care had standards worth the name. Andrew Cuomo knew this. On March 24, 2020, he declared: "My mother is not expendable. And your mother is not expendable. And our brothers and sisters are not expendable."

The next day, his administration issued a directive ordering nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients without testing. Thousands died. When families demanded to know how many, they were given a number that a 104-page congressional referral later documented was falsified. The actual death toll was undercounted by approximately 50 percent.

Cuomo testified to Congress in June 2024 that he was not involved in drafting the report. Evidence suggested otherwise. There were emails. Edited drafts. His own handwritten notes in the margins. The subcommittee referred him to the Department of Justice for making false statements to Congress in October 2024. The Biden Department of Justice received that referral. It did nothing.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer resubmitted the referral in April 2025. An investigation was reportedly opened. Then silence. Pam Bondi was removed from her post as attorney general in April. Her replacement has not publicly addressed the referral. Cuomo ran for mayor of New York City twice. He lost both times. His team argued prosecution was election interference. That argument no longer holds. There is no election left. There is only the question of whether the rule of law applies equally to a powerful former governor as it does to anyone else.

That question remains unanswered.

Voices for Seniors was founded six years ago by families who refused to accept that calculation. We have testified before Congress and written to two attorneys general. We have written op-eds, given interviews, made calls and knocked on doors in Washington that were sometimes opened and sometimes shut. We did all of this while grieving. Because we understood early on what the powerful were counting on: that eventually, we would stop.

If thousands of children had died under these circumstances, if a directive had sent infectious patients into facilities housing children, if the death count had been falsified, if a cover-up had been documented line by line before Congress, there would have been a commission. There would have been prosecutions. There would have been the kind of reckoning that follows tragedies where the victims are young and the public refuses to look away.

Our loved ones were old. And someone calculated that their families might eventually move on.

The congressional letter sent today by Tenney is not a legal filing. It will not compel the Department of Justice to act. But it is a public declaration that the people elected to represent New York's families have not forgotten either. And it matters, because silence from the powerful only works when no one is watching.

We are watching. We have been watching for six years. And we will keep asking is there one standard of accountability in this country, or are there two: one for the powerful, and one for everyone else?

The families we represent know which answer they have been living with. Six years of it. And they are still proving that calculation wrong.

Grief has a long memory. We haven't forgotten. And neither, we hope, will the Department of Justice.

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Opinion - They calculated that New York nursing home families would move on. They were wrong.