30 January 2022: Editorial - Investigation needed: State DOH head doesn’t want to review nursing home scandal

Editorial — Investigation needed: State DOH head doesn’t want to review nursing home scandal

The editors of Batavia's Daily News have noticed that replacement NY Governor Kathy Hochul's pick to lead New York's Department of Health, Mary Bassett, is strangely uninterested in learning any lessons about the spread of COVID in New York's nursing homes during the period Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive. The following excerpt picks up on a key point from Bassett's confirmation hearing in New York's state senate.

Oddly, she claimed to have never read the March 25, 2020, memo from the state DOH. Bassett also said that she had no intention of looking backward.

“I decided when I took up this post that I wasn’t going to try and unravel what had happened in the nursing homes under the previous commissioner,” she said, WXXI reported. “But simply look forward.”

This was an alarming admission by the woman seeking to lead this vital agency. Compounding the problem with this directive was the fact that the state Legislature approved a bill to offer immunity to heath care and nursing facilities for treatment provided to patients during the pandemic.

This struck many as a heavy handed, backroom deal. The administration of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo put the squeeze on nursing homes to admit patients who had suffered from COVID-19, and they enjoyed legal protection from civil and criminal actions if other residents became sick and died as a result.

It’s imperative that we find out how these policies came to be drafted and implemented. We need to know who approved them and how to prevent outside pressure from adversely influencing public health procedures.

Bassett must agree to a thorough investigation of this scandal. It includes a revelation by the office of state Attorney General Letitia James that authorities misreported the number of nursing home residents who died due to COVID-19.

Bassett said that as a doctor, she would not follow a directive like this. But Dr. Howard Zucker, her predecessor, also is a doctor and took the same oath to do no harm. Yet he went along with this disastrous plan.

Such a probe wouldn’t merely assist Bassett in heading the state DOH. It would benefit all of us.

It’s essential that we know how our government operates and when those in charge make serious errors. We will only discover this if officials conduct an in-depth scrutiny of what happened in this case. Then we as constituents and voters can make informed choices.

Bassett's strange lack of interest represents an abdication of responsibility on her part. It can also be construed as a tacit admission she believes the public health officials who played roles in developing, implementing, and enforcing the Cuomo administration's deadly directive are guilty of grave misconduct for which they should face legal consequences. After all, investigating what happened would mean finding out how extensive their misconduct was. As a leader, if she learned all that about the people she now supervises and did nothing about it, as seems to be her plan, she would become a complicit accessory to a crime after the fact.

Does that seem like a more plausible explanation for her weird lack of interest as a leader than what she's claims?