Disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo boasted to a congressional committee earlier this year that he had tapped “Contagion” director Steven Soderbergh to discuss his administration’s COVID-19 response.
The 66-year-old Democrat appeared in June before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to answer tough questions about his handling of the outbreak — including a disastrous decision to force 9,000 patients recovering from COVID into nursing homes across the state.
But when asked to deliver his opening statement, Cuomo, who received a special Emmy Award for his press briefings early in the pandemic, couldn’t help but rely on a little star power.
“There was a movie called ‘Contagion,’ 2010, that I would recommend that you watch,” Cuomo instructed members and staff of the House COVID subcommittee on June 11. “Good movie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Lawrence Fishburne. 2010, but I brought him in during the COVID. I was doing briefings every day, Steven Soderbergh, the director.”
“And I said to him, ‘How were you so prophetic that you did a movie in 2010, ten years before, that was basically identical to what happened in COVID?’” Cuomo recounted. “And he said, ‘Well, if you look at Ebola and Zika, etc., and you look at the responses, you knew what the response was going to be.’”
Cuomo relayed the anecdote as part of a combative, closed-door interview with the COVID panel, which has investigated aspects of the US public health response to, as well as the origins of, SARS-CoV-2.
“The challenge is: Find out what we did, what we did wrong, Monday-morning quarterback,” the ex-gov said as part of his testimony, which evaded responsibility for both the March 25, 2020, “must admit” order of COVID hospital patients to nursing homes and an attempted “cover-up” of the resulting fatalities, according to a subcommittee report.
“We lost the game, got it. But what do we do going forward?” he deflected. “Because it is going to happen again. It is just a matter of time.”
“Contagion” told the story of a deadly global pandemic originating from animal-to-human contact in Hong Kong.
Cuomo received an Emmy in November 2020 for his public briefings on the coronavirus — but was later stripped of the award after a slew of sexual harassment allegations led to his resignation in August 2021.
A spokesman for the former governor told The Post that Soderbergh was one of hundreds of people who got in touch with Cuomo after the start of the pandemic.
