Health Officials Hitting The Road Due To Issues With Gov. Cuomo’s Vaccine Rollout
Michael Cantrell
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Nine high-ranking health officials in the state of New York have now left their positions as Gov. Andrew Cuomo took over control of the state’s incredibly flawed vaccine rollout program.
Some of the individuals who stepped down from their post or decided to hang it up and retire includes Dr. Elizabeth Dufort, the medical director in the division of epidemiology and Dr. Jill Taylor, who is the head of the laboratory that monitors virus variants.
Cuomo himself has gone to battle against state health officials over what he says is a botched vaccination campaign developed over the last few years by health experts at the state and local levels.
“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts because I don’t,” Cuomo said in a Friday press conference.
Cuomo’s distrust of his own healthcare officials’ abilities to implement the vaccination campaign prompted him to announce a plan in December that would leave much of the logistics of administering vaccines among healthcare workers and local populations to large hospital systems. To help him and his team engineer the vaccination “hubs,” Cuomo tapped consultants and the in-house lobbyist for Northwell Health, the state’s largest hospital system.
Insisting that the speed of vaccinating people is paramount, Cuomo shelved vaccine distribution plans designed over the years by local public health departments in preparation for epidemics and bioterrorism attacks and by using their experiences dispensing vaccines during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
Aides for the governor have stated that hospitals were picked to be vaccine hubs due to their cold storage capabilities, which is required to keep Pfizer’s vaccine viability intact. It was also part of their strategy to ensure that front-line healthcare workers were immunized before everyone else.
The only problem here is that by giving hospitals the largest portion of shots, it led to a slow rate of vaccination. In other words it created a bottleneck.
This guy is the worst, isn’t he? It seems like him and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer are trying to see who is the worst possible governor in the history of our nation.
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