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ASPartOfMe
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10 Jan 2021, 12:16 pm

Andrew Cuomo’s Vaccine Debacle Perfectly Encapsulates His Style of Governing

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Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, has always embodied a dark irony of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Cuomo’s state has a higher death toll than anywhere else in America and his austerity-driven politics continue to cripple public institutions, he has won hysterical praise from many of the nation’s leading newspapers, magazines, and television shows. People have literally declared themselves “Cuomosexuals” and hawked his merchandise on Etsy. The inexplicable cult of worship, birthed at the height of the pandemic in New York last spring, has managed to linger on through the carnage.

Cuomo’s failure to contain the virus in the earliest weeks of the outbreak doomed New York to far more suffering than it needed to endure. Now, with a vaccine here, he is again proving his lack of fitness to lead New York through the worst crisis it has faced in modern history. For weeks, unused vaccine doses have sat in freezers, with some even being thrown out. After imposing extremely complex and rigid guidelines over who can receive a vaccine, Cuomo threatened health care providers with million-dollar fines if they didn’t follow the rules he had created for who can get a shot first.

While it’s understandable that Cuomo would want to ensure that health care workers and nursing home residents received the vaccine in priority, his determination to wield maximal control over the operation has only slowed the process down

If New York City or any town wanted to vaccinate a sick elderly person not in one of Cuomo’s priority groups, they were immediately blocked.

On Friday, under furious pressure from local officials — including Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, who called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to defy Cuomo altogether and start vaccinating more people — Cuomo relented.

Whereas 5 million New Yorkers received the smallpox vaccine in a two-week period in 1947, Cuomo said that, this time, it would take until April to administer doses to all of the state’s elderly.

Overall, New York is currently neither laggard nor leader in the race to vaccinate its population. According to the CDC, it is on par with some large states like Texas and Florida. But given the scale of death the state has already suffered, Cuomo cannot afford to simply match the pace set by states run by Donald Trump acolytes.

What makes all this so infuriating is that Cuomo had many months to prepare for what’s happening now. The question was when — not if — a coronavirus vaccine would arrive. After downplaying the threat of the virus in March and ignoring public health experts who called for earlier lockdowns, Cuomo had an opportunity to reflect on his mistakes and ensure a less tragic future. Instead, he published a memoir and boasted about a curve flattened on the backs of the dead.

In that sense, Cuomo and Trump aren’t so different — both seek to rewrite reality to fit self-serving narratives. Cuomo may not resort to incitement to violence like the more egregious Trump, but he harbors the same kind of authoritarian instincts as the more chaotic president.


The above was not the ravings of a whining conservative. It appeared in Jacobin a socialist website.


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Mona Pereth
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14 Jan 2021, 5:25 am

A big problem here has been the antipathy between Cuomo and DeBlasio, for which I'm inclined to blame both of them. Sometimes I get the feeling that Cuomo has been countermanding DeBlasio for no good reason but just to be contrary. Cuomo grew up in Queens but sometimes acts like he just doesn't understand NYC.


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ASPartOfMe
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14 Jan 2021, 5:52 am

Mona Pereth wrote:
A big problem here has been the antipathy between Cuomo and DeBlasio, for which I'm inclined to blame both of them. Sometimes I get the feeling that Cuomo has been countermanding DeBlasio for no good reason but just to be contrary. Cuomo grew up in Queens but sometimes acts like he just doesn't understand NYC.

I get that feeling more than sometimes. DeBlasio will say he going to do something. Cuomo says not yet and does it a day or two later. This is Cuomo's standard operating procedure.


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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman