Cuomo vaccine czar’s loyalty calls raise concerns
The head of New York state’s vaccine rollout called county officials to gauge their loyalty to Gov. Andrew Cuomo as he faces allegations of sexual harassment.
New York’s “vaccine czar” — a longtime adviser to Gov. Andrew Cuomo — phoned county officials in the past two weeks in attempts to gauge their loyalty to the embattled governor amid an ongoing sexual harassment investigation, according to multiple officials.
One Democratic county executive was so unsettled by the outreach from Larry Schwartz, head of the state’s vaccine rollout, that the executive on
Friday filed notice of an impending ethics complaint with the public integrity unit of the state attorney general’s office, the official told The Washington Post. The executive feared the county’s vaccine supply could suffer if Schwartz wasn’t pleased with the executive’s response to his questions about support for Cuomo.
The executive said the conversation with Schwartz came in close proximity to a separate conversation with another Cuomo administration official about vaccine distribution. “At best, it was inappropriate,” said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that the Cuomo administration would retaliate against the county’s residents. “At worst, it was clearly over the ethical line.”
Schwartz, who is working in a volunteer capacity to run New York’s vaccine distribution, acknowledged making the calls in response to an inquiry by
The Post, but said he did so as a 30-year friend of Cuomo and did not discuss vaccines in the conversations.
“I did nothing wrong,” Schwartz said. “I have always conducted myself in a manner commensurate to a high ethical standard.”
Schwartz is one of Cuomo’s longtime lieutenants, serving as secretary to the governor — the most influential aide to the New York governor — from 2011 until 2015, and then advising him off and on since, earning the reputation as Cuomo’s enforcer. Schwartz returned last spring to be the administration’s point person on the coronavirus pandemic — moving into the governor’s mansion at one point — and has managed much of the state’s response. His calls to county officials could fuel questions about an intermingling of politics with the state’s public health operation. The conversations came in advance of a
March 8 announcement by Cuomos’s office that the state plans to open 10 new mass vaccination sites around New York, distribution hubs sought by local officials.
Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said political outreach by the person helming the state’s vaccine response could lead to officials fearing that vaccine decisions could be based on favoritism.
“People do not see calls coming from the governor’s mansion as somebody wearing one hat and then putting on another hat,” he said. “If you are in control of a vital supply of a life— saving resource like vaccines, you are carrying an enormous amount of implicit clout when you ask for political allegiance. And you shouldn’t be doing that anyway. The public health goal to maximize the best use of vaccines has nothing to do with any public declaration of political fealty.
And it shouldn’t even be implied or hinted at.”
In several statements he emailed to The Post on Saturday, Schwartz said the calls he made to assess political support for Cuomo were distinct from the role he plays in the vaccine distribution effort.
“I did have conversations with a number of County Executives from across the State to ascertain if they were maintaining their public position that there is an ongoing investigation by the State Attorney General and that we should wait for the findings of that investigation before drawing any conclusions,” he wrote.
Schwartz described the calls as “cordial, respectful and friendly,” adding: “Nobody indicated that they were uncomfortable or that they did not want to talk to me.” He added that decisions about where to locate mass vaccination sites are not made by one individual but are determined by members of the governor’s vaccine task force and outside consultants, “based on merit, data and facts and not politics.”
Schwartz declined to answer if he had taken the ethics oath required for New York state public officers. The law states no officer should engage in conduct that could give an impression that any person could “unduly enjoy his or her favor in the performance of his or her official duties.”
On Friday, a majority of the New York congressional delegation — including the state’s two U.S. senators — called for Cuomo to step down, issuing a barrage of public statements, many just minutes apart from one another. One official involved in the discussions said the timing was planned to absolve any one lawmaker from receiving Cuomo’s wrath.
“He can’t kill us all at the same time,” said the official, a senior aide to one of the lawmakers who called for Cuomo to resign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Cuomo has denied accusations of unwanted touching and largely been defiant in the wake of growing calls for his resignation. He has dismissed some of the claims as part of a “cancel culture” that he derided as “dangerous” and “reckless,” urging critics to wait for the conclusion of the state attorney general’s probe of the harassment allegations. He said earlier this month that he never intended to cause any pain or make anyone feel uncomfortable.
The controversies have been fueled in part by a growing willingness — even among party allies — to break a code of silence that was long expected in the notoriously fealty-driven world of New York politics.
The Biden administration is deploying the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Mexican border to help care for thousands of unaccompanied migrant teens and children who are arriving in overwhelming numbers and being packed into detention cells and tent shelters, the Department of Homeland Security said Saturday evening.
The deployment marks another escalation in the administration’s response to the growing crisis at the border. It is part of what DHS said would be a 90day government-wide effort at the border, where an unprecedented number of minors are arriving without their parents each day and must be sheltered and cared for until they can be placed with a vetted sponsor, usually a parent or relative already living in the United States.
About 8,500 teens and children are living in shelters run by Health and Human Services, and unaccompanied minors are arriving more quickly than HHS officials can place children with sponsors. They have been unable to quickly add capacity to accommodate the new arrivals, which means nearly 4,000 minors are jampacked in Border Patrol station holding facilities and jail cells designed for adults. These sites have become dangerously overcrowded in recent days, according to lawyers who represent migrant children.
Soon after taking office, President Joe Biden said his administration would no longer turn back minors who cross the border without their parents, a policy that the Trump administration implemented using an emergency health order. Immigrant activists and child advocates denounced that practice for denying minors the opportunity to apply for asylum in the United States while exposing them to potential risks in Mexico.
Biden officials have not said why they did not anticipate or better prepare for the unprecedented surge that has followed the policy change. As many as 700 teens and children have crossed the border without their parents in recent days, and the strain has been most acute in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, where emergency shelters are filled beyond capacity.
The crisis has become quickly politicized, with Republicans blaming Biden’s policy change for the surge.
“When people think they can get in, they begin sending their unaccompanied child on a train ride across Mexico where she may be kidnapped and trafficked on the hope that they’re going to be waved through at the border,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said on
“Fox News Sunday.”
Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, defended Biden, saying that while the conditions at the border were “unacceptable,” there also needed to be acknowledgment that “the flow of humanity at our front door never stopped.”
“We began seeing the increase of unaccompanied minors going back to last April 2020,” Escobar said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “This is not something that happened as a result of Joe Biden becoming president.”
During the first major influx of migrant teens and children in 2014, the Obama administration also deployed FEMA, which helped set up temporary housing and processing stations on military bases. Biden officials have not said whether the Defense Department has agreed to help with the current surge, and the DHS statement did not indicate where FEMA might find shelter beds for the teens and children.
Officials have used hotels along the border since the start of the pandemic to hold minors, but attorneys sued the Trump administration to halt the practice. The government will “look at every available option to quickly expand physical capacity for appropriate lodging,” the DHS statement said.
While FEMA can help provide logistical support, it would not be able to leverage disaster funding without the assent of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, who has blasted the Biden administration’s immigration policies. Abbott has also balked at a DHS proposal for FEMA to handle coronavirus testing for migrants as well as isolation procedures for those who test positive.
Under U.S. law, minors are supposed to be transferred from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to HHS within 72 hours. HHS holds the minors in childappropriate shelters while refugee officials identify a sponsor who is eligible to take custody. In nearly
90% of cases, the sponsor is one of the child’s parents or immediate relatives already living in the United States.
That process takes more than a month on average, and with teens and children arriving faster than HHS has been able to release them, the Border Patrol facilities have been backed up.
“A Border Patrol facility is no place for a child,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in the agency’s statement. “We are working in partnership with HHS to address the needs of unaccompanied children, which is made only more difficult given the protocols and restrictions required to protect the public health and the health of the children themselves.”
Rumors and conspiracy theories swirled this past week regarding the whereabouts of Ze Gotinha, the mascot for the nation’s national vaccination program.
The clamor surrounding the costumed Ze Gotinha began Wednesday, after former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva drew attention to his recent absence.
“Where is our beloved Ze Gotinha?” da Silva said in a speech criticizing President Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic.
Ze Gotinha, whose name translates roughly as “Joe Droplet” and who resembles an overgrown Casper the Friendly Ghost, was created in the 1980s to help the health ministry promote vaccination against the polio virus and put children at ease.
“The advertisements about vaccines had been very heavy. They were associated with something terrible, tragic, life-threatening,” Carla Domingues, former coordinator of the national vaccination program between 2011 and 2019, told The Associated Press.
Gotinha changed that and, due to his success, he has since made regular appearances to warn about the importance of preventing measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough, diphtheria and, most recently, COVID-19.
But the last time Gotinha was seen publicly in a ceremony in Brasilia was Dec. 16, launching the national vaccination program. The character, beloved by children, declined Bolsonaro’s handshake in the name of social distancing.
Da Silva, a leftist who is Bolsonaro’s rival, presented his own theory about what happened to Gotinha: “Bolsonaro fired him, because he thought he was from the Workers’ Party.”
One theory is that the mascot’s publicity services may not be needed at the moment, as Brazil is using its limited doses to vaccinate the elderly and people in priority groups, not yet children.
Many on social networks are speculating about Gotinha’s fate. One person spoke of the drama of Gotinha being unemployed. Another reinterpreted a typical poster of a missing child, with the image of the mascot and the caption “disappeared”.
“Cheering for the quick recovery of Ze Gotinha. Only this hero can save us,” said a Twitter user who speculated the mascot could be recovering from a disease.
Since coronavirus vaccinations started in Brazil, Bolsonaro has cast doubt on their effectiveness. He recently began walking back such skepticism, but continues to claim drugs such as hydroxychloroquine can help prevent hospitalization.