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New York Gov. Andrew CuomoDiana Robinson / Flickr

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January 15, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – A spokesperson for New York’s Andrew Cuomo has blasted Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean after she criticized the governor for his response to the COVID-19 “pandemic,” saying, “Last I checked she’s not a credible source on anything except maybe the weather.”

Dean, both of whose parents-in-law died with COVID-19 in nursing homes in New York, blames Cuomo’s policy forcing nursing homes to receive COVID-positive patients for their deaths. The governor had barred nursing homes from denying COVID-positive patients’ admittance or re-admittance, despite the increased risk of the virus to the elderly. An estimated 6,000 COVID-related deaths resulted from Cuomo’s executive order.

The order also inhibited care homes from testing patients for the virus before granting them a bed, which likely contributed to the spread of the virus among the most vulnerable. After facing criticism for the decision, Cuomo fired back, saying: “They don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with that.”

In October last year, Cuomo released an autobiography called “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Dean noted the fatal hypocrisy in Cuomo releasing such a book, given that the state of New York reportedly saw some of the highest deaths related to COVID-19 in the country, 40% of which came from nursing homes. She criticized the governor, saying he is more interested in “being a celebrity instead of being a governor.”

In an op-ed penned for Fox News on January 12, Dean wrote: “If you ask those who lost loved ones in nursing homes, as my family did in 2020, his leadership has been a failure starting with his March 25 order to put COVID-positive patients into nursing homes for 46 days, and the subsequent cover-up of the total number of seniors we’ve lost since then.”

Speaking to Fox News, Dean also complained about Cuomo’s current vaccination regimen: “Writing a book, doing a COVID poster, winning an Emmy, hosting a birthday party for himself … he’s doing four state of the state addresses this week. Instead, he should be talking about this massive failure trying to get the shot into arms of New Yorkers, especially the vulnerable.”

In October of last year, Cuomo blasted religious communities, including his fellow Catholics, for resisting his orders restricting the number of worshipers and threatening them with fines of up to $15,000 for violating the rules. Cuomo blamed religious communities for the rise in COVID-19 cases, saying religious people “are not following the rules.”

“We know what happens when you don’t follow the rules: the infection rate goes up,” he added, especially targeting an “ultra-orthodox” community for what he called a “cluster” of cases.

“This is not a matter of religious freedom, right? I don’t care if you’re a Roman Catholic, you’re Jewish, you’re Muslim, you’re an atheist, you have to follow the rules of the state, the laws of the state,” he said in a CNN interview, neglecting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

That November, following an emergency application to the Supreme Court by the Diocese of Brooklyn, the Supreme Court overruled Cuomo’s restrictions on places of worship, blocking the governor from enforcing the limits against religious buildings and places of worship.

Cuomo’s run-ins with the Church pre-date the current coronavirus crisis. In 2019, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, pointed out that politicians who, like Cuomo, want to support abortion, same sex “marriage,” and other moral evils, while claiming to be Catholic, are not truly in communion with the Church.

“Andrew Cuomo makes it clear that he doesn’t believe Catholic teaching and therefore he’s ex-communion. He’s out of communion,” Bishop Strickland said. “I think to make it clear, and thankfully some of the bishops in other places have taken steps to basically say that, that a politician or anyone who says, ‘I don’t agree with the Catholic Church on basic critical issues,’ they’re choosing to be out of communion.”

Strickland added that “[w]hen you do that, you’re out of communion, and I think we need to be clear that people like Andrew Cuomo are not in communion with the Catholic Church, and therefore should not be receiving the Body of Christ.”