According to Andrew M. Cuomo, the government’s publisher over his leadership during the pandemic, the title was discontinued due to an investigation into the withholding of data on the deaths of residents of nursing homes.
Sales of the book “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic” had already slowed dramatically when the governor found himself in overlapping crises of his own making, including a barrage of accusations about his inappropriate behavior toward younger women and his assistants’ manipulation of nursing home data.
Gillian Blake of Crown Publishing Group said in response to an email from The New York Times that there were “no plans” to reprint Cuomo’s book or to reissue it in paperback, referring to “the ongoing investigation into NYS reporting on Covid-related deaths in nursing homes.”
The book was published by Crown, a division of Penguin Random House, which rushed to get it in print last year. The publisher celebrated the acquisition last summer in an announcement in which he described how Mr. Cuomo would write ‘in his own voice’ about ‘the decision-making that shaped his political policy’.
A Cuomo spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Mr. Cuomo and his best assistants disguised the actual number of nursing home residents with Covid-19 who died, excluding those who died in the hospital last year.
The Cuomo administration released the data in February, after a report by Attorney General Letitia James suggested that counting was widespread, and a court ordered that the data be made public following a lawsuit by the Empire Center, a conservative think tank.
Mr. Cuomo began work on the book early last summer as he received praise for his pandemic leadership and a wave of national popularity fueled by his daily news conferences.
The decision to publish a triumphant report of the fight against the coronavirus was interviewed by some political observers at the time, especially considering the devastating death toll in New York and the second wave of the looming disease, even though Mr. Cuomo promotional opportunities for the book done. Mr. Cuomo, however, said the book was not premature, arguing that it was ‘half-time’ in the pandemic, noting that the manuscript presented a ‘blueprint for the future’.
Critics and political opponents of the governor, including President Donald J. Trump, have asked questions about his handover of nursing homes in New York, which was hit hard during the worst days of the March and April outbreak.
By June, Cuomo’s top assistants had wrapped up their own health department over the information they had to include in a report on the deaths of nursing home residents. At the time, the state publicly reported that about 6,500 nursing home residents had died, leaving out those transported to hospitals. The true score was over 9,000, according to a table compiled for the report and reviewed by The Times.
After the assistants, including her most senior adviser, Melissa DeRosa, learned that the health department wanted to include the higher number, they rewrote the report to take it out, according to documents and interviews with people with direct knowledge of the discussions.
The governor’s office said the nursing home numbers were still finalized at the time and that the total number of deaths in the state had remained the same.
Four days after the report was published, Cuomo said in public for the first time in a July 10 radio interview that he was thinking of writing a book. At that point, he had already started asking permission from a state oversight agency to earn outside income from book sales.
The book was only formally announced the following month. It hit the shelves in October and was quickly declared a top seller.
But its sales are being touted as a new wave of coronavirus infections coming across the state and the country. It seems that the trend has increased over the past six weeks as the public image of the governor has turned downwards due to a cascade of scandals.
According to three people familiar with the case, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have launched an investigation into the handling of state nursing homes.
“Pending the ongoing investigation,” she said. Blake said in the email, “we have interrupted the active support of ‘American crisis’ and we do not intend to reprint or reissue the paperback.”
Even before several women came forward to Mr. Cuomo accused of sexual harassment in the workplace and other inappropriate behavior, the sale was dead. Between January 23 and February 27, according to NPD BookScan, the title sold only about 400 copies, with a total of 45,800 sold, and several thousand e-books were also purchased. (According to BookScan, online sales are tabled much more slowly.)
Mr. Cuomo did not say how much money he was paid to write “American Crisis,” which covers a period from the discovery of the first case in New York on March 1 to June 19, when he was the last of more than 100 consecutive reasons gave. daily news updates.
One chapter of the book was focused on May 10, when the governor reversed his course in a March memorandum in which nursing homes required them to take in or re-admit Covid-positive residents. The memorandum became a focal point for attacks by critics of the governor.
Mr. Cuomo spends much of the chapter defending the performance of his administration and describes the criticism of the memorandum, dated March 25, as politically motivated.
“Republicans needed a transgression to divert from the story of their federal response – and they desperately needed it,” Cuomo wrote in the book. “That’s why they decided to attack Democratic governors and blame them for deaths in nursing homes.”
But Cuomo later argued in the same chapter that “the facts completely defeated the Republican claim.”
‘New York was no. 46 of the 50 in the country in terms of the percentage of deaths in nursing homes ‘, the governor wrote, citing a July report suggesting that’ the virus came into nursing homes when the workforce became infected. ”
New York’s actual position in the ranking of states would have been worse if the actual toll – about 50 percent higher than it revealed – had been included in the analysis.
Cuomo administration officials and state health officials both said the conclusions of the July 6 report – that the March memo was not a major driver of deaths in nursing homes – remained the same with the supplementary data. The withholding of the actual number of nursing home residents who died did not change the total number of deaths in Covid-19 in New York – which now stands at more than 47,000, including more than 15,000 nursing home residents.
But with the book by mr. Cuomo, his assistants for months prevented the health department from changing the death toll significantly higher.
‘American crisis’ was published on 13 October. Since then, 15,025 coronavirus deaths have been reported in New York, according to The Times’ database.