The doctor is out
Dr. Howard Zucker, the man who, aside from former Gov. Cuomo himself, is most closely associated with New York’s long war against COVID — including its egregious failure to release vital data about exactly how many nursing-home residents died of the virus and when — is resigning as state health commissioner. No complaints here.
In his place, Gov. Hochul must appoint someone who will live up to mantras of transparency and accountability she so often repeats, while pushing for policies consistent with the best public health advice.
It was Zucker who penned the fateful order essentially requiring nursing home residents who had tested positive for COVID to be returned to those homes in order to open up hospital beds, potentially infecting other seniors. That wasn’t responsible for 15,000 deaths in long-term care facilities, as hyperventilating critics insist; most infections in those homes seem to have been brought in by staffers. Still, the order may have led to the deaths of hundreds or even more than a thousand people — and rather than answer questions, Team Cuomo brought out the fog machine.
Hochul and her new top doc must now clear that fog away, a job they’ve only begun to do. In addition to complying with all Freedom of Information Law requests from the Empire Center for Public Policy — including the statewide total of transfers and the number of employees sickened daily in each home — that should include releasing the document produced by lawyer Elkan Abramowitz, whom the Cuomo administration hired to defend it back in March.
Dr. Zucker’s dad was also Dr. Zucker. In the early 1960s, he championed mandatory polio vaccination for New York’s schoolchildren. The son gets credit for helping beat back a measles outbreak; then, thanks to vaccine resistance primarily in Orthodox Jewish communities, New York found itself at the epicenter of an outbreak, years after the illness had supposedly been eliminated.
Of course, it was another virus the response to which will define his tenure, for better and worse.