12 November 2021: Transcripts - Cuomo Pandemic Response Top-Down, Demoralizing

Ex-health official: Cuomo pandemic response top-down, demoralizing

This report focuses on testimony collected as part of the state attorney general's probe into Andrew M. Cuomo's alleged sexual harassment of multiple women, but which relates to how the resigned-in-disgrace governor and his senior staffers ran the state's health department during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Tucked into the sexual harassment investigation of ex-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is a detailed transcript in which a former high-ranking state Health Department official describes a series of internal problems with the Cuomo administration’s response to COVID-19, including controversies the administration tried to tamp down.

For instance, forcing statewide test results to be routed through the governor’s office first, rather than a reporting system to alert local health officials. Making unrealistic demands — in screaming phone calls — about swab tests and vaccine rollouts.

Prohibiting state health officials from collaborating with county and city health officials through online webinars. A frustrated staff contemplating producing its own report on nursing home cases....

To be sure, the testimony does venture into sexual harassment/creepy comments made by Cuomo toward the former health official, who this report identifies as Dr. Elizabeth Dufort though her name is redacted in the transcript. We're skipping over that content however to focus on her description of how Andrew M. Cuomo interfered with the state's Department of Health's operations during the pandemic. The next excerpt gets into the meat of those allegations:

In the early days of the pandemic, health staff were told to route data through the executive chamber first, before putting it into a system county agencies could use to make quarantine determinations. This was a change from past practices. Dufort and others went to the agency counsel who asked if they wanted "to be whistleblowers" on the issue. She said no, they just wanted change. Soon, however, commercial labs came online for testing and the issue became moot, she said.

The administration blocked the agency from working with local health departments in various ways, from holding unofficial and online meetings to sending out health guidance. That echoes complaints voiced by a number of county executives around the state. "We had to stop doing webinars with them. We couldn't collaborate with them on evaluations of different problems and projects," Dufort told investigators.

Cuomo's office wanted the agency to come up with a plan to distribute 40 million doses of the COVID vaccine in one month, which agency officials knew wasn’t possible. But they nevertheless spent a weekend developing "these plans that we knew were not based in reality."

The physician heard from colleagues who were concerned about data on nursing home cases and deaths and considered "writing up a paper that they said would never see the light of day based on the lack of approvals." Cuomo had been criticized for underreporting nursing home numbers.

The executive chamber at times rejected surveys developed by staff in favor of some produced by McKinsey & Company, a high-priced consulting firm. Then Dufort would be asked to present the work because she was a physician.

There's more to the story of Cuomo's interference with health officials, which we'll be covering in a second entry for the timeline.