New York State needs a trusted voice as health commissioner
The damage Andrew Cuomo and Dr. Howard Zucker did to the state Department of Health is immeasurable. Time and time again, the former governor and his health commissioner subsumed the department’s integrity to the burnishing of Mr. Cuomo’s reputation — and to their everlasting shame, the men did so even as New York was confronting the COVID-19 pandemic.
Perhaps the most egregious example is the intentional underreporting of nursing home deaths after the controversial mandate requiring that the facilities accept COVID-positive patients. In an effort apparently aimed at limiting any negative impact to the velocity of what was then Mr. Cuomo’s rising star, the administration and Dr. Zucker’s department manipulated COVID-19 data reported to the public, cleansed an official report of accurate numbers and stonewalled state legislators and reporters seeking an honest death count.
Michael M. Santiago/Pool via AP
That scandal was enough to warrant Mr. Cuomo and Dr. Zucker losing their jobs, but, alas, it wasn’t the end. Those misdeeds were accompanied by the VIP COVID-19 testing afforded to the former governor’s friends and family — a wholly inappropriate and perhaps illegal program that used public resources, including top Health Department officials and state troopers, to hurry samples to and through the Wadsworth Laboratory in Albany.
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.