Unqualified crony running NY’s vaccinations leaned on county officials to try to save his boss’s job
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Nice vaccines we have, shame if we had to stop handing them out in your county for a bit:
New York’s “vaccine czar” — a longtime adviser to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo — phoned county officials in the past two weeks in attempts to gauge their loyalty to the embattled governoramid an ongoing sexual harassment investigation, according to multiple officials.
One Democratic county executive was so unsettled by the outreach from Larry Schwartz, head of the state’s vaccine rollout, that the executive on Friday filed notice of an impending ethics complaint with the public integrity unit of the state attorney general’s office, the official told The Washington Post. The executive feared the county’s vaccine supply could suffer if Schwartz was not pleased with the executive’s response to hisquestions about support of the governor.
The executive said the conversation with Schwartz came in close proximity to a separate conversation with another Cuomo administration official about vaccine distribution.
“At best, it was inappropriate,” said the executive, who spokeon the condition of anonymity out of fear that the Cuomo administration would retaliate against the county’s residents. “At worst, it was clearly over the ethical line.”
Schwartz, who is working in a volunteer capacity to run New York’s vaccine distribution, acknowledged making the calls in response to an inquiry by The Post, but said he did so as a 30-year friend of Cuomo and did not discuss vaccines in the conversations.
“I did nothing wrong,” Schwartz said. “I have always conducted myself in a manner commensurate to a high ethical standard.”
“My ‘I have always conducted myself in a manner commensurate to a high ethical standard’ T-Shirt is raising many questions already answered by my shirt.”