Fox News just handed a contributor deal to the woman who sat at Andrew Cuomo’s right hand while New York hid the COVID nursing home death toll.
The backlash was instant — and some of it came from people who used to work in the same building.
And what former Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean said about it will have a lot of loyal viewers demanding answers.
The Hire Fox News Is Trying to Frame as Routine
Fox News announced that Melissa DeRosa will join the network as a contributor and co-host of a new podcast, “the Girls,” which debuts October 1, according to a Fox News Media press release.
The premiere episode lineup includes Rachel Campos-Duffy, Harris Faulkner, Kat Timpf, former ESPN host Samantha Ponder, and DeRosa.
Fox described DeRosa in its own press release as a “veteran democratic strategist” who held senior positions in former New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration and became the state’s first female secretary to the governor.
That description leaves out quite a bit.
DeRosa did not just work for Cuomo. She sat at the center of one of the most consequential COVID-era cover-ups in any state government, one that involved hiding the number of dead elderly New Yorkers from the people’s elected representatives.
And she said so herself — on a recorded call.
What DeRosa Admitted on That Conference Call
In February 2021, the New York Post published audio of DeRosa on a call with state Democratic lawmakers. On that recording, she acknowledged that the Cuomo administration held back the full COVID-19 nursing home death toll from legislators after then-President Donald Trump “turns this into a giant political football” and the Justice Department began asking questions.
“And basically, we froze,” she said.
She went further. “We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation,” DeRosa said.
That is not bureaucratic caution. That is an aide to the governor of New York telling Democrat lawmakers, on a call she apparently believed was private, that the administration suppressed death data to protect itself from a federal investigation.
Elderly men and women were dying in those nursing homes. The public and the legislature had a right to know how many. The Cuomo administration decided that political self-preservation came first.
And Melissa DeRosa was the one explaining why on that call.
A 2021 report from the New York State Assembly alleged that Cuomo had personally edited the Department of Health’s numbers to reduce nursing home COVID deaths by thousands. The Daily Caller first reported in 2020 that New York omitted an unknown number of deaths from COVID in reports on residents of nursing homes and adult care facilities.
DeRosa resigned in August 2021 following allegations that Cuomo sexually harassed government employees.
Janice Dean Fired Back — and Fox News Has a Real Problem
Former Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean did not stay quiet. Her mother-in-law and father-in-law both died following stays in New York long-term care facilities during the pandemic. She spent years as one of Cuomo’s most prominent media critics, and she had something direct to say about the DeRosa hire.
“Just a reminder: Melissa DeRosa helped smear the women who came forward about Andrew Cuomo’s harassment, and played a hand in undercounting nursing home deaths during COVID. Also tried to silence my advocacy,” Dean wrote on X.
“My family never forgets what these people did to us,” she added.
Dean also claimed recently that Fox eventually restricted her ability to discuss Cuomo on the air. If that is accurate, the irony of the network then turning around and handing DeRosa a contributor role is hard to miss.
But Fox News has not publicly addressed Dean’s allegations about being muzzled, and the network has not indicated that any of this backlash changes DeRosa’s scheduled role.
So here is where things stand. Fox News is platforming a woman who, by her own words on a recorded call, helped an administration freeze death data on seniors to protect itself from a Trump Justice Department inquiry. The families of those seniors never got a full accounting. Some of them, like Janice Dean’s family, lost loved ones during the period the data was suppressed.
And now DeRosa gets a contributor badge and a podcast co-host chair.
This is worth stating plainly: the COVID-era lockdowns and the government mandates that went with them caused enormous damage to American life. Democrat governors across the country used emergency powers in ways that crushed businesses, isolated children, and confined the most vulnerable people in facilities where the virus then killed them in enormous numbers.
What happened in New York nursing homes was not an accident of policy. It was compounded by a deliberate decision to hide the scale of the damage. The people who made that decision spent years afterward avoiding accountability while the media largely moved on.
Fox News has long positioned itself as the outlet willing to hold those people accountable. Giving one of the central figures in that cover-up a regular platform sits uneasily against that brand promise. It is going to be difficult to question the premise of government COVID overreach on one show while the person who helped conceal its body count shows up on another.
DeRosa has, since leaving the Cuomo administration, become an outspoken critic of progressive Democrats, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. She has argued that politicians aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America are trying to reshape the Democrat Party from within. Whether that late-arriving criticism redeems her record is a question Fox News viewers are entitled to think through for themselves.
But Fox News should not pretend the record does not exist. The press release describing DeRosa as simply a “veteran democratic strategist” does exactly that. It launders a history that the network’s own audience knows, because the network’s own personalities — including Dean — spent years reporting on it.
The families who lost elderly relatives in those nursing homes did not get a clean press release. They got silence, revised numbers, and a cover-up that DeRosa explained in her own words on that call.
That is not ancient history. It is the thing Fox News just decided to paper over when it handed Melissa DeRosa a microphone.
Sources: Just the News; Daily Caller; New York Post; American Liberty News; Resist the Mainstream