End the vaccine confusion
About vaccination, there’s good news and, well, uncertain news. And uncertainty when it comes to the urgent need to vaccinate a state of 19something million people in a pandemic isn’t nearly good enough.
The good news is that, after a sluggish rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, the previously intransigent Cuomo administration now says it will work with counties to help accomplish the mass vaccination program.
What’s uncertain is what the counties’ role will be. If the administration’s record on this is any indication of what’s next, it may not be all it can and should be. Indeed, it may be lethal.
County leaders have been saying for weeks now that they didn’t just come up with a mass vaccination program on the fly, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration did. They had prepared and practiced for this not for a few weeks or a few months, but for years. In some cases, they’ve already done this kind of mass vaccination program.
Yet rather than tap the counties’ expertise, the state decided to forge ahead with a new idea, a sort of regional hub strategy coordinated by hospitals. But hospitals had never overseen mass vaccinations before. Meanwhile,
by the way, the federal government has a separate strategy of using pharmacies to do some vaccinations.
It’s as if the country went to war and decided to go in a new direction rather than use the U.S. military. How about those college ROTC units?
This gets rather mind-boggling when one considers how generally strong a job the Cuomo administration did initially in handling the pandemic. But in recent months, it has come under fire, sometimes justifiably, for its insular approach. Such was the case with nursing home deaths, about which it has spent months hiding basic information, even after requests as far back as summer from the Legislature.
The administration bristles at questions of whether an executive order by the governor telling nursing homes to take back residents who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 infections — an order the governor later rescinded — caused more infections and deaths.
Politics may explain some of this. Among the critics of the governor’s positions are Republican adversaries, like county executives Steve Mclaughlin of Rensselaer County and Marc Molinaro of Dutchess County. The latter ran against the governor, and the former would leap at the chance.
But it’s vital that state and local officials put aside political attacks and sensitivities if New York is to get back to normal anytime soon. The confusion — like vaccine doses being thrown away for lack of people to give them to — is bad enough. By some estimates, at the rate the state is vaccinating so far, it could take four years to get the job done. That’s unacceptable. Delay could leave more people vulnerable to the coronavirus, and thus more deaths.
So when a former top aide to the governor, Larry Schwartz, acknowledged to county executives last week that things have been “helter-skelter” and say the state would “look to expand the role that counties play in the rollout,” that was good news.
But when he added that, “We'll follow up with you on what that means," that uncertainty was, in a word, not.
Like the end of this pandemic, here’s what’s true about a clear and well-conceived follow-up: It can’t come soon enough.