December 1, 2023

On a recent episode of HBO’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher, guest Scott Galloway sat across from Maher and the former Democrat governor of New York Andrew Cuomo and said, “I was on the board of my kids’ school during COVID. I wanted a harsher lockdown policy. In retrospect, I was wrong. The damage to children by keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risks. 

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“But here’s the bottom line. Myself, the great people at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), I’d like to think the governor, (Cuomo nods) we were all operating with imperfect information, we were doing our best. Let’s learn from it. Let’s hold each other accountable. But let’s bring a little bit of grace and forgiveness amidst the shitshow that was COVID.”

Scott Galloway is a professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and host of “The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway.” He’s an influencer with over 566,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter). Across from him was the man who was governor of New York oversaw some of the country’s most incompetent, deceptive, and draconian measures of the pandemic.

Cuomo was the one to have hospitals ship COVID-positive patients to nursing homes where the elderly, the most vulnerable population to the disease, were located. The results were both tragic and disastrous. Said progressive media site Slate.com, “New York has had the second-highest number of  COVID-19 fatalities per capita of any state, trailing only New Jersey.”

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He appeared nightly on his brother’s CNN show in something that resembled schtick more than a public health service. He shut down everything from stores and businesses, to churches, schools, and any venue where communities gather. He enforced the nightly shutdown of the New York City subway to disinfect months after infectious disease experts said COVID did not spread by surface contact.

Late in 2021, the Cuomo administration admitted it was manipulating the data by excluding nursing-home resident deaths because they didn’t die on site in those facilities from COVID. They died in hospitals after contracting the virus in nursing-home care.

To be sure, Cuomo and Galloway were not outliers. They were joined by countless other local, state, and federal officials, health experts, business leaders, academics, the news media, big tech, Hollywood, big pharma, and corporate America.

Against this backdrop, Galloway now says that, “We were all operating with imperfect information, we were doing our best.”

But Were They?

It appears they really weren’t doing their best, if by “their best,” they mean looking after the public welfare.