Mr. Cuomo’s failed test
Ayear ago, when the mushrooming coronavirus pandemic was new and frightening, Gov. Andrew Cuomo comforted New Yorkers by saying we were all in the same boat and would get through the crisis together.
“I don’t care how famous, how smart, how rich, how powerful you think you are,” he said during his daily briefing on March 31, 2020. “I don’t care how young, how old. The virus is the great equalizer.”
But not all New Yorkers turned out to be equal when it came to testing.
As the Times Union reported last week, Mr. Cuomo directed high-level Department of Health officials to prioritize testing for members of his family and other friends of the administration.
At a time when COVID -19 tests were in scarce supply and desperately needed by nurses, supermarket workers, nursing home staffers and others on the front line of the crisis — Mr. Cuomo’s VIPS not only received tests but had their samples rushed by state troopers to the Wadsworth Center laboratory in Albany, where they were placed at the head of the line.
While less-influential New Yorkers often waited weeks for tests and results, if not longer, Mr. Cuomo’s preferred group got their results within hours. And in some cases, the preferential system apparently involved extraordinary and outrageous wastes of public resources.
For example, The Washington Post reports that Eleanor Adams, a toplevel Health Department physician who was coordinating testing issues for nursing homes and other highrisk settings, was dispatched multiple times to the Hamptons home of Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor who is also the governor’s brother. The visits sometimes took hours.
Think about that. A state health official, paid by taxpayers, who should have been spending her every working moment on the fight to protect one of New York’s most threatened populations, was instead catering to the privileged brother of the governor. The audacity is astounding.
Others among the hundreds who reportedly received preferential testing include Matilda Cuomo, the governor’s mother; fashion designer Kenneth Cole, the governor’s brother-in-law; and Regeneron head George Yancopoulos, an executive with long-standing ties to the Cuomo administration.
Mr. Cuomo apparently needs a reminder that he and his family are not royalty. His position does not entitle his relatives and friends to preferential treatment on the public dime. Health officials employed by the state for vital tasks are not his family’s personal caretakers.
We’ll also remind Mr. Cuomo of the state Public Officers Law, which states that a government official must not “use or attempt to use his or her official position to secure unwarranted privileges or exemptions for himself or herself or others.”
The Assembly was right to add the preferential testing scheme to the long list of items being investigated in an impeachment inquiry. This one shouldn’t get lost in the scrum. At the height of an intense public health crisis, Mr. Cuomo violated principles of fairness and equity by putting his friends and family ahead of everybody else, including the most vulnerable. It was both a likely violation of the law, and a failed test of character.
For a governor entrusted with safeguarding all New Yorkers, it doesn’t get much worse than that.