25 September 2021: Opinion - Howard Zucker's Legacy of Cover-Ups

Churchill: Howard Zucker should have been fired after Hoosick Falls

Albany Times-Union columnist Chris Churchill reviews Howard Zucker's career and finds a legacy of failure and disturbing dishonesty. It's well worth clicking through to read the whole thing, but here's a short excerpt:

It was his Health Department that issued that controversial March 2020 order forcing New York nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients. The nursing homes, as you may remember, weren't even allowed to test incoming patients for the virus.

The mandate, which sent 9,000 virus patients into nursing homes, was foolish and ultimately reversed, but what Cuomo and Zucker did over the months that followed was arguably more egregious. They refused to tell New Yorkers how many nursing home residents had died of COVID-19.

Here's how Bill Hammond of the Empire Center for Public Policy put it: "When (the order) was blamed for worsening the death toll in nursing homes, Zucker played a central role in the Cuomo administration’s efforts to obscure what happened — by misstating how the directive worked, withholding data, publishing falsified research under the health department’s name and stonewalling inquiries from the Legislature."

The nursing home scandal was an echo of Hoosick Falls. In both cases, a vulnerable population with little political power was left exposed by Zucker's department. In both cases, mistakes were followed by deflection and shocking dishonesty.

Again, do click through to read the whole thing. Although we focused on the COVID nursing homes scandals in the featured excerpt, Zucker's role in the Hoosick Falls poisoned water scandal was his on-the-job training for learning how to cover up a health care scandal on his watch.