No place for loyalty politics in vaccination effort

The following is from a Buffalo News editorial:

A quick multiple-choice quiz on pandemic politics:

When is it a good idea for a high-level public servant to confuse his constituents on whether their lives matter?

1. When he is under stress and worried about keeping his job.

2. Never.

We’ll assume the answer is obvious; yet, somehow, the Cuomo administration got it wrong. New York’s vaccination czar — a man with overarching influence over the health of 19 million New Yorkers — simultaneously became the arbiter of the loyalty of Democratic county executives to the embattled governor.

Larry Schwartz was once the top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and he came back to help coordinate the state’s response to the coronavirus.

He now leads the state’s vaccination program.

What was he thinking? Commingling that life-and-death work with the political task of testing the loyalty of the party’s county leaders was reckless and dumb.

The story predictably blew up when some of those county executives spoke with reporters at The New York Times and The Washington Post. The legal counsel for one of the county executives filed a preliminary complaint with the public integrity division of the state attorney general’s office.

Schwartz has denied any effort to use the vaccine as a club to intimidate county executives and, in at least one case, a different aide made the political call, but it was immediately followed by a vaccine distribution call from Schwartz.

If this was accidental, then the Cuomo administration is less politically attuned than its reputation. So, let’s just say this: It was foolhardy.

It would be politics as usual for any administration under pressure to assess its standing among party leaders. There is nothing wrong with that. It would also not be unthinkable for powerful politicians to lean on elected officials to keep them in the fold. It happens.

But it can be a dangerous business, especially when the cudgel in hand is the health of the public.