Nine top New York health officials quit amid Cuomo undercutting expert advice, report says

Health officials told The New York Times that morale was at an ‘all-time low’ in the state’s Health Department

At least nine top New York health officials have quit their jobs since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as Governor Andrew Cuomo faces accusations for undercutting expertise advice in managing the novel virus.

New York State Health Department’s deputy commissioner for public health left the position in late summer, months into the pandemic impacting millions in the state.

Following the resignation, the director of communicable disease control and the medical director for epidemiology also left. Then just last month, a state epidemiologist announced she would step down from her post.

The mass exodus from health officials, The New York Times reports, was partially due to Mr Cuomo and his leadership choices that sometimes undercut the Health Department and its experts.

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts. Because I don’t. Because I don’t,” Mr Cuomo said during his Friday news briefing, speaking of health officials in government.

One point of issue between health officials in the state department and the governor’s office was vaccine rollout plans, according to the newspaper.

Mr Cuomo opted against using vaccination plans long developed by the Health Department when distributing Covid-19 vaccines to residents. Instead, he and his advisers developed their own plan in the state that would hinge on large hospital systems to distribute most of the vaccine doses.

The governor has claimed he had no choice but to take over vaccine distribution, as the state initially fell behind other states across the country on how swiftly it was administering the doses. But health officials found out about the change in plan through Mr Cuomo’s news conference, the newspaper reports, which caused tension.

Vaccine doses were moving more swiftly through the state in recent weeks. Mr Cuomo announced on Sunday that “88 per cent of first doses allocated to NYS healthcare distribution sites have been administered.”

New York now ranks 19th in the nation, as of 28 January, for how many of its allocated doses its administered to residents, according to a Becker’s Hospital Review analysis.

State officials also said they were undercut with other policy initiatives throughout the pandemic, including business closures and public events being based on a color-coded “microcluster” map created by the governor’s office based on case and hospitalisation numbers.

Dr Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, has remained at his post and often appears with the governor during the daily press briefing. He said in a statement that the department was in “an intense period of extraordinary stress and pressure and a different job than some signed onto.”

He added that The New York Times’ report was correct that staff members have left the agency, but also “many others joined the agency with the talents necessary to confront this new challenge.”

The state has recorded more than 1.4 million infections since the start of the pandemic and 35,178 residents have died from the novel virus.

Current and formal health officials said morale was at an “all-time low” within the agency as the novel virus continues to cause surges across the state. 

The Independent contacted the New York Department of Health for a comment.

This report comes at a time when Mr Cuomo faces criticism for how New York has reported nursing home deaths during the pandemic. Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, reported last Thursday that the state has undercounted Covid-19-related deaths in nursing home facilities by the thousands.

Her report was confirmed later that day when the state’s Health Department added an additional 3,800 deaths to its coronavirus tally. This raised the state’s total death toll within those facilities by 40 per cent, but Ms James said that tally could be off by as much as 50 per cent.

“Who cares — 33 [per cent ], 28 [per cent], died in a hospital, died in a nursing home. They died,” Mr Cuomo said on Friday, sparking instant backlash.

New York holds the most Covid-19 deaths of any state partly due to the spring surge it experienced after European travellers carried over the novel virus. 

Mr Cuomo has remained firm in defending his administration as it responds to the pandemic. 

“If Times reporters think I push hospitals too hard and local governments too hard, I say I’m a fighter for the people of New York and I believe I’m saving lives,” the governor said of the recent criticism.