Former Wisconsin Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin called out former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former Mayor Bill de Blasio on their inconsistent COVID mandates that deemed a National Football League (NFL) playoff game essential while religious gatherings were labeled risky.
During Wednesday’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing, Cuomo and de Blasio were under fire for their 2020 pandemic mandates.
Tseytlin detailed his previous questioning of Cuomo and de Blasio saying, “why are other gatherings more essential than religious worship?”
“They couldn’t tell us,” he added.
“Governor Cuomo decided that the fans could attend the Buffalo Bills playoff game in certainly much closer quarters than he was allowing the institutions — religious institutions to gather,” Tseytlin added.
“So I guess we learned that attending a football game is more essential than worshiping,” he added.
“This targeting of religious minorities blaming them for the pandemic is the kind of thing that we’ve seen throughout history and that’s what Governor Cuomo was doing,” he said, citing religious groups he had spoken to.
“We learned that attending a football game is more essential than worshiping.”
Former Wis. Solicitor General slams Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio’s arbitrary lockdown orders that cherry-picked “essential gatherings” based on political preferences.
@RepMalliotakis pic.twitter.com/J82oGfPHfs— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (@COVIDSelect) June 21, 2023
In November 2020, in response to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking exemption from attendance restrictions, Cuomo’s office claimed that “many of the State’s early cases were attributable to religious gatherings that served as super-spreader events.” (RELATED: ‘Specials’: Cuomo Prioritized COVID-19 Testing For His Own Relatives, Other VIPs During Shortage)
A month later in mid-December, de Blasio shared that another lockdown was “increasingly necessary just to break the back of our second wave, to stop the second wave from growing, to stop it from taking lives, to stop it from threatening our hospitals.” Then on Dec. 30, Cuomo announced that nearly 7,000 people would be able to go watch the Buffalo Bills in their playoff game.