As COVID-19 was breaking out in New York state last March, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order requiring nursing homes to accept patients who were presumed to have the virus. Following the order, about nine thousand COVID patients were brought into nursing homes across the state, likely leading to the virus’s rampant spread in those facilities.

Governor Cuomo responded to his mistake by listening to the demands of one of his top donors: the lobbying group for the nursing home industry. As the Daily Poster reported in May, he granted full corporate legal immunity to nursing homes, all the way up to the C-suite. At the time, New York Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim warned that the liability protections removed a key deterrent to corporate misbehavior and effectively shielded nursing home executives from legal consequences if their cost-cutting, profit-maximizing decisions endangered lives.

Now the situation has exploded into a full-scale scandal: last week, Cuomo’s administration was caught on tape admitting it was withholding data about how many nursing home residents had been infected with COVID, and how many had died.