Members of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s family weren’t the only VIPs to receive tests for the coronavirus during the state’s critical test shortage.
Another beneficiary, who had close ties to the disgraced chief executive, was the billionaire president of Regeneron pharmaceutical company, George Yancopoulos.
Yancopoulos and his company, the New York Times has reported, have been tight as a tick with the Cuomos since at least the 1990s. The company is involved in testing and providing treatment for the potentially fatal Asian germ.
The special treatment for Yancopoulos and the Cuomo clan — including brother Chris, the CNN talker — is yet another subject in the impeachment probe by state legislators.
Company Request
“The company requested tests from the state for its president, Dr. George Yancopoulos, and his family after a ‘member of his household became infected with Covid-19,’ a company spokeswoman said,” the Times reported. “State officials granted the request and tested the family at home in March.”
Regeneron was set to make 500,000 test kits for the state and provide them free, although Yancopoulos “was not involved in the donation.”
Still, preferred access to tests, even for a doctor, is fishy.
That’s because Regeneron glued itself to the Cuomo crew 30 years ago, the Times reported. First, the company hitched its wagon to Mario Cuomo, then governor and Andrew’s old man. Andrew, apparently, inherited the job of keeping the company happy:
Regeneron has a long history of upstate investments, backed by successive Cuomo administrations. It was Mario M. Cuomo, the governor’s father, who made an early bet on the company in 1991 when he was governor, supporting the firm with $250,000 that was described then as an equity investment.
Regeneron has been a beneficiary of the current Cuomo administration as well: In 2018, the state development agency granted the company up to $140 million in incentives to expand its operations in the capital region.
For its part, the company claims that Yancopoulos is an essential employee: “Dr. Yancopoulos has directly led the company’s ambitious and successful efforts to advance a groundbreaking therapy for this devastating pandemic,” the company told the Times. “As an essential worker, leading and meeting regularly with his research team, and to ensure Dr. Yancopoulos was not posing a risk to this team, Regeneron requested testing from the state for his household after a household member became infected with Covid-19.”
Regeneron was also involved in providing special treatment to President Trump and some of his cronies.
Yancopoulos can’t be all bad. During the height of last summer’s Black Lives Matter riots, he told high-school graduates at their commencement that “all lives matter.” A Two Minutes of Hate episode was the result. Yancopoulos apologized.
The Cuomo Clan
But some lives so matter more than others, the Cuomos believe. That’s why the governor provided virus tests to his family at a time when the tests were in short supply. Other New Yorkers suffered as the Cuomos went to the head of the line.
And as The New American reported this morning, citing Albany’s Times Union and the Washington Post, Cuomo’s family wasn’t just tested. They received the answer right away.
“The coronavirus test specimens were then rushed — at times driven by state police troopers — to the Wadsworth Center, a state public health lab in Albany, where they were processed immediately, the Post reported:
At times, employees in the state health laboratory were kept past their shifts until late into the night to process results of those close to Cuomo, two people said.
One of the beneficiaries of that VIP scheme was Chris Cuomo, the leftist CNN star.
During that time, the network permitted him, wrongly, to interview his brother. During one interview, the two discussed the test shortage after the CNN talker had already been tested — thanks to his big brother, the governor.
“Chris Cuomo is directly involved in a serious abuse of power scandal by his brother: in fact, he’s the prime beneficiary of that scandal,” commentator Glenn Greenwald wrote:
So not only did they conceal that they had both just used state resources to get Chris that scarce testing, but they both acknowledged that there was a resource shortage to serve the general public, even as Gov. Cuomo was lavishing those resources on his own family.
