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- New York’s troubled coronavirus vaccine rollout is under the microscope.
- Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s penchant for micromanaging played a major role, according to experts.
- The Democratic governor’s response was the subject of a New York Times investigation published Monday.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s micromanagement style and top-down approach to distributing the COVID-19 vaccine played a role in the “bottleneck” preventing more shots from going into arms, as well as nine of the Empire State’s top health officials quitting their jobs.
Cuomo’s decision to relegate preexisting county-level plans to administer the vaccine came with damaging second-order effects, including growing defections from state medical experts, according to a New York Times investigation published Monday.
As the Biden administration tries to ramp up vaccine production and distribution at the federal level, states have seen varying degrees of success from when they were handed the first rounds of doses during the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed.
Cuomo, along with other governors, has complained that his state have not gotten the level of doses they need as of yet, constricting their ability to get shots into arms.
However, as the Times investigation found, Cuomo’s singular efforts to take control over his state’s distribution plan also led to serious problems.
Even before Operation Warp Speed sent trucks and planes out to hand off the first doses, Cuomo's penchant for consolidating power was already beginning to pose problems.
The deputy commissioner for the New York State Department of Health resigned in the late summer, followed by the director of DOH's bureau for communicable disease control, then the medical director for epidemiology, then the top state epidemiologist last month, according to the Times.
Despite a winter surge hitting New York hard after it bore the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic's arrival last March and April, Cuomo "all but declared war on his own public health bureaucracy," the Times investigation found.
"When I say 'experts' in air quotes, it sounds like I'm saying I don't really trust the experts," Cuomo said in his COVID briefing last Friday. "Because I don't. Because I don't."
Cuomo consults with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Michael Osterholm, a leading infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota who is now on President Biden's COVID advisory panel, according to the Times.
The governor's clashes with his own experts left vaccine planning to the consulting firms Deloitte and BCG along with a lobbyist for the largest private hospital network in New York.
Private hospitals have posted higher percentages of their doses being used, while public hospitals in New York City and other providers in pockets of Upstate New York have lagged behind.
—Jimmy Vielkind (@JimmyVielkind) January 29, 2021
Cuomo's decision to rely on hospitals instead of county health departments to administer the vaccine put the state government at a disadvantage, according to Dr. Denis Nash, an epidemiology professor at the City University of New York. Nash is also a former senior official for the New York City Department of Health.
"That was the bottleneck," Nash told the Times. "To put hospitals in charge of a public health initiative - for which they have no public health mandate, or the skills, experience or perspective to manage one - was a huge mistake, and I have no doubt that's what introduced the delays."
The Cuomo administration has frequently responded to criticism of the vaccine rollout with complaints about the federal supply remaining too low. Back in December, Cuomo said it would take six to nine months for the vaccine to make a difference in every day life, and called for more weekly doses to be shipped to the Empire State.
In an interview with the Times, Cuomo defended his decision to overtake vaccine distribution from the preexisting county health department plans by quoting the boxer Mike Tyson.
"It's the Mike Tyson line: 'Everybody has a plan until I punch them in the face,'" Cuomo said.
"The scale changes everything," the governor continued. "My job is to get the vaccinations done as soon as possible."