The deputy commissioner for public health at the New York State Health Department resigned in late summer. Soon after, the director of its bureau of communicable disease control also stepped down. So did the medical director for epidemiology.
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Last month, the state epidemiologist said she, too, would be leaving. The drumbeat of high-level departures in the middle of the pandemic came as morale plunged in the Health Department and senior health officials expressed alarm to one another over being sidelined and treated disrespectfully, according to five people with direct experience inside the department.
Even as the pandemic continues to rage and New York struggles to vaccinate a large and anxious population, Mr. Cuomo has all but declared war on his own public health bureaucracy. The departures have underscored the extent to which pandemic policy has been set by the governor, who with his aides crafted a vaccination program beset by early delays. The troubled rollout came after Mr. Cuomo declined to use the longstanding vaccination plans that the State Department of Health had developed in recent years in The Main Elements Of A Bureaucracy with local health departments. Cuomo instead adopted an approach that relied on large hospital systems to coordinate vaccinations not only of their own staffs, but also of much of the population. In recent weeks, the governor has repeatedly made it clear that he believed he had no choice but to seize more control over pandemic policy from state and local public health officials, who he said had no understanding of how to conduct a real-world, large-scale operation like vaccinations.
After early problems, in which relatively few doses were being administered, the pace of vaccinations has picked up and New York is now roughly 20th in the nation in percentage of residents who have received at least one vaccine dose. Cuomo said at a news conference on Fridayreferring The Main Elements Of A Bureaucracy scientific expertise at all levels of government during the pandemic.
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Former President Donald J. Trump warred publicly with Dr. Anthony S. Around the country, frustrated and overwhelmed public health officials have resigned in large numbers. In Albany, tensions worsened in recent months as state health officials said they often found out about major changes in pandemic policy only after Mr. Cuomo announced them at news conferences — and then asked them to match their health guidance to the announcements.
That was what happened with the vaccine plan, when state health officials were blindsided by the news that the rollout would be coordinated locally by hospitals. But it also occurred earlier with revisions in a host of state rules from the fate of indoor dining and businesses like gyms to capacity limits on social gatherings, according to a person with direct experience inside read more department.
Earlier in the pandemic, the health officials were often informed about criteria for who was eligible to be tested for the virus — for example, an expansion to include essential workers like transit workers, police and firefighters — from Cuomo news conferences, the person said. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, has remained in his post, and appears with Mr. Cuomo at news conferences.]
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