12 August 2021: Opinion - NYDOH Director Howard Zucker Needs to Be Shown The Door

Churchill: Howard Zucker should follow Cuomo out the door

Chris Churchill offers a solid personnel suggestion for Kathy Hochul, currently New York's nearly invisible Lt. Governor, for when she assumes the state's governorship in 12 days:

Yes, last week's damning report from the office of Attorney General Letitia James lit a fire under impeachment and made it impossible for the governor to continue. But it was the other report from James, the one about nursing homes, that really launched the long descent leading to Cuomo's resignation.

That report, released in January, found that the Cuomo administration had undercounted by thousands the number of nursing home residents who died from COVID-19. It also was critical of an infamous state order that required nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients, asserting that the mandate "may have put residents at increased risk of harm."

The findings were a black eye for Cuomo, certainly, making clear that his administration had engaged in a cover-up intended to make the controversial order look less deadly. But it was also stain on Howard Zucker, the state's health commissioner.

Zucker, after all, had allowed state health data to be tainted by Cuomo's political influence — and during a pandemic, no less. When New Yorkers needed him most, he stood by while the Health Department became an arm of the governor's public-relations operation.

It gets worse. We later learned that Cuomo aides in 2020 had been allowed to rewrite a Health Department report on nursing homes, scrubbing an accurate death count from its pages.

But wait, there's more. There was also Cuomo's special priority COVID testing for friends, family, and politically connected acquaintances, which diverted state government employees from serving the public's needs at a time when COVID tests were in very short supply, not to mention nearly non-existent for New York nursing homes....

The VIP testing, probably illegal under the state's Public Officers Law, is corruption for which Cuomo was to blame and Zucker was again complicit. Together, the men shredded the integrity and reputation of the Health Department, which is no small thing. It is, after all, a department that New Yorkers need to trust, pandemic or not.

And that's why Zucker should follow Cuomo out the door. If the commissioner won't resign, incoming governor Kathy Hochul should fire him without a shred of regret.

The hundreds, if not thousands, of excess COVID deaths resulting from Cuomo and Zucker's deadly 25 March 2020 directive could not have happened without a team effort. It took dozens of officials in just the state's Department of Health to implement and enforce it. The entire department needs a complete housecleaning. It shouldn't stop with forcing Zucker out the door.