SHARE:
Soon after prisoners in New York correctional facilities sued Gov. Andrew Cuomo and won, they began receiving hard-won COVID-19 vaccinations.
The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision wrote in a statement to City & State that it began offering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to all incarcerated individuals on April 6. As of mid-April, 894 incarcerated individuals and 23 staff members had been vaccinated through this effort.
But then those vaccinations stopped, as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was put on pause by the federal government on April 13. The department had been using the Moderna vaccine since February.
Getting shots in the arms of inmates to begin with, however, has been a battle. On March 30, a judge ordered the state to administer COVID-19 vaccines to prisoners after a lawsuit from a coalition of advocates argued that Cuomo and state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker had unfairly denied prisoners access to the vaccine.
State asked to lift restrictions to let all back on LI beaches this summer, officials say
newsday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Elkin Abramowitz, legal counsel for the governor’s office, dismissed the brouhaha of the report as overblown. There are cynical suggestions offered for the plain and simple truth that the chamber wanted only to release accurate information that they believed was totally unassailable, he said in an email to the
Washington Examiner.
Abramowitz said the chamber responded to the Department of Justice request with what they deemed to be totally accurate numbers, and Cuomo was interested in putting out only accurate information to highlight the contrast between Albany and Washington.
“What’s going on in the press now is exactly what the chamber wanted to avoid while William Barr was [attorney general], he added.
Elkan Abramowitz, who is representing Cuomo s office, said the administration was hesitant to release the numbers because they were unsure if they were reliable. The chamber was never satisfied that the numbers that they were getting from DOH were accurate, Abramowitz told the Times.
The Times also highlighted a Health Department report that was allegedly rewritten by Cuomo senior advisers a number of times. The final draft of that report insisted that admissions coming from hospitals were not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities, instead saying that staff were the likely cause of spreading infections.
However, a previous draft included a section that put the number of nursing home residents at more than 9,700, which was much higher than the administration was saying at the time, the report said. It also stated that about 35 percent of deaths in the state were nursing home residents but the report released to the public was changed to say 21 percent.
ALBANY - The director of New York s nationally recognized Wadsworth Laboratory retired last September amid the COVID pandemic. Now the deputy director is also set to leave after 28 years at the lab, another major loss to the beleaguered state Department of Health.
The loss of Jill Taylor and the pending departure of Victoria Derbyshire, who recently signaled her intent to retire from the Albany-based lab, are among at least a dozen top health officials in New York who have either quit, retired or were reassigned in recent months, according to sources and public records.
The top doctors and executives have left amid what has been a bruising year for the agency at the forefront of the coronavirus pandemic, which has led to even longer hours and higher stress particularly among the department s higher ranks.
vimarsana © 2020. All Rights Reserved.