Cuomo’s War on Public Health

By far, the most overrated politician’s response to COVID is Andrew Cuomo, who has been outright terrible but gets played up in the media as the mainstream responsible alternative to Donald Trump. But when your actions, like those of Trump, cause leading health experts to resign rather than work with you, well, I think that means the public needs to reconsider your unearned accolades.

The deputy commissioner for public health at the New York State Health Department resigned in late summer. Soon after, the director of its bureau of communicable disease control also stepped down. So did the medical director for epidemiology. Last month, the state epidemiologist said she, too, would be leaving.

The drumbeat of high-level departures in the middle of the pandemic came as morale plunged in the Health Department and senior health officials expressed alarm to one another over being sidelined and treated disrespectfully, according to five people with direct experience inside the department.

Their concern had an almost singular focus: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Even as the pandemic continues to rage and New York struggles to vaccinate a large and anxious population, Mr. Cuomo has all but declared war on his own public health bureaucracy. The departures have underscored the extent to which pandemic policy has been set by the governor, who with his aides crafted a vaccination program beset by early delays.

The troubled rollout came after Mr. Cuomo declined to use the longstanding vaccination plans that the State Department of Health had developed in recent years in coordination with local health departments. Mr. Cuomo instead adopted an approach that relied on large hospital systems to coordinate vaccinations not only of their own staffs, but also of much of the population.

Money quote:

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference on Friday, referring to scientific expertise at all levels of government during the pandemic. “Because I don’t. Because I don’t.”

If only the media looked outside of New York for better examples of leadership on this. I’m not saying Jay Inslee and Kate Brown have been amazing in their response to COVID. But Washington and Oregon have handled this far, far better than New York. On the other hand, they don’t come from elite political families near major media markets and with brothers on CNN. And it’s not as if our media is going to try to get things right.