16 April 2021: An Ongoing Exodus of NY DOH Officials

Top NY Health Department officials continue exodus amid COVID pandemic

This is a pretty significant report, describing the departure of senior officials at New York's Department of Health. It doesn't take long for the article to arrive at a Cuomo administration scandal:

The director of New York's nationally recognized Wadsworth Laboratory retired last September amid the COVID pandemic. Now the deputy director is also set to leave after 28 years at the lab, another major loss to the beleaguered state Department of Health.

The loss of Jill Taylor and the pending departure of Victoria Derbyshire, who recently signaled her intent to retire from the Albany-based lab, are among at least a dozen top health officials in New York who have either quit, retired or were reassigned in recent months, according to sources and public records....

Some have attributed their departure to general fatigue, family-related issues or reaching retirement age. Others have expressed frustration with being sidelined by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his inner circle at key points of the COVID-19 crisis. And for some, it's been a combination of the two....

The departures represent much of the leadership team under Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, who was been a loyal ally of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and has drawn calls from lawmakers for his ouster over the handling of COVID deaths in nursing homes and the extraordinary death toll in New York, which ranks second only to California.

His top deputy Sally Dreslin left last fall, and in recent months so too has the director and second-in-command at the Office of Public Health, as well as the head of the Center for Community Health.

The article also cites the Empire Center's Bill Hammond, one of the leading independent analysts into the deadly interventions of Cuomo administration officials in New York's health care system during the coronavirus pandemic:

"Even if you had a governor who respected what they did and treated them well, I think the intensity level of the past year was such that you may have had burnout," said Bill Hammond, a senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank.

"And then on top of that, you have pretty well documented cases where they were not being listened to by the governor’s office and then were being misused, to the extent that they were being asked to do tests, giving special treatment, to the governor’s friends and family."

For his part, Hammond has analyzed the schedules of top Cuomo administration officials, which turned up a regular pattern:

A review of Cuomo's public schedules last month by Hammond showed that Cuomo met largely with his small inner circle during the pandemic, including Zucker....

The control over the process by Cuomo and his aides were viewed as part of a pattern during the pandemic.

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Cuomo said Jan. 29. “Because I don’t.”

The New York Times, which first reported in February about some of the Health Department departures, said tensions worsened because Cuomo would often announce major changes in COVID policy during his public briefings and then, after the fact, have the health department come up with the specifics

The departing NY DOH officials are not free and clear of involvement in Governor Cuomo's nursing home deaths scandals. Many have so far remained silent rather than come forward with details of the interventions of Team Cuomo, including its cover up of the full extent of COVID deaths among New York's nursing home residents.

They would however be key witnesses in a serious criminal investigation of the Cuomo administration's COVID nursing home deaths scandals. That they are not free and clear of involvement may provide prosecutors with a point of leverage in getting them to turn state's evidence.