Dufort’s testimony as “second- or thirdhand interpretations from an employee whose only interaction with the governor or his top staff was during a live Covid briefing.” The senior health official in charge of data ran into the hall crying after getting the directive and was told she could quit if she disagreed, Dr. Dufort said, both because she worried that it violated strict privacy provisions, and because it could delay getting the results to New York City and other counties. The official, whose name is redacted in the report, insisted that the main state laboratory that was analyzing Covid tests in the pandemic’s early days, Wadsworth, report its results to the governor’s office before the test results were released to local health departments. “He was a close individual to the governor who fixes situations,” she said. For a stretch at the beginning of the pandemic, as cases skyrocketed, the governor’s office sent in an official “who was very up front with us that he did not have public health experience” to lead the department’s pandemic response. The “chamber” sometimes seemed more concerned about managing the flow of information than coordinating an effective response, she testified. At one point, her failure to get out a Covid-19 guidance document she had written for state health providers reduced her to tears, she said. Dufort refers to as “the chamber,” shorthand for the “executive chamber,” as the governor’s office and top advisers are often called in Albany, she testified.īottlenecks in that process meant some public health guidance would be released late or never at all. Routine work by the state’s disease experts - even something as mundane as preparing a flyer explaining the ins and outs of quarantine and isolation - had to be cleared by what Dr. The result, she said, was that senior health officials at the city and state level “couldn’t really share any valuable information.” “I was upset that we couldn’t work with New York City,” Dr. Cuomo’s imprint on the state Health Department, and how a top-notch public health agency had ended up mired in dysfunction just when it was needed most. In her interview with investigators for the attorney general, Dr. Dufort said that comment and an earlier one the governor had made to her were inappropriate. Dufort, 44, approached him, covered in protective equipment.
Dufort uncomfortable, she told investigators. The moment was meant to encourage New Yorkers to get tested, but the encounter with the governor left Dr. Cuomo’s nose in a televised demonstration of a Covid-19 test. Elizabeth Dufort, the former medical director of the state Health Department’s division of epidemiology.ĭuring one of the governor’s daily briefings in May 2020, Dr. Though her name is redacted in the transcripts, the details she describes make clear she is Dr. Her testimony was part of a trove of evidence from the investigation that was released earlier this month. Cuomo, 63, had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women.
These are among the new details that emerged from the testimony of the official, who was interviewed over Zoom in May as part of an attorney general’s investigation that found that Mr. The governor’s office blocked state Health Department employees from coordinating with their counterparts in New York City and other local health departments, the official said. One edict from that office made it more difficult for the Health Department to initially track a dangerous syndrome associated with Covid-19 that has appeared in hundreds of children across the state, according to the new testimony. Now his reputation as an effective governor during a public health emergency is coming under further scrutiny, as recently released testimony from a former high-ranking state health official accuses the governor’s office of repeatedly stymieing and undermining the state’s public health experts in the first year of the pandemic.
His deal to write a book about his leadership during the pandemic is being investigated by a state ethics panel, and he could be forced to forfeit millions he made from the book. Cuomo resigned in August amid a sexual harassment scandal, he was lauded as a hero of the pandemic, whose daily Covid-19 briefings left viewers feeling less isolated during New York’s devastating first wave.īut his pandemic leadership has since come under reappraisal, in large part because of the high death toll among nursing home residents and a slow-burning scandal over whether Mr.