A Ray of Sunlight for New York

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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Let us be among the first to tip our hat to our erstwhile Albany leg, Bill Hammond, and his colleagues at the not-for-profit Empire Center in Albany for bringing the elixir of sunlight to the Covid story in New York. And to endorse Mr. Hammond’s call, made today on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, for New York State to release to the public all of the Covid data it has been holding back.

“Albany,” Mr. Hammond writes, “has kept New Yorkers in the dark for months about Covid-related deaths in nursing homes, and someone finally needs to pull back the curtain and let the sun shine in.” The “necessary reckoning” should start with “a bold exercise in transparent government” — with the state Health Department opening “its vault of pandemic data” and release to the public “every last digit.”

It’s all the more urgent a suggestion now that the state Assembly is considering whether to impeach Governor Cuomo over, among other things, his handling of the Covid crisis. The big breakthrough on that front started with a freedom-of-information lawsuit launched in September against the state by the Empire Center. In early February, it won in court a resounding, even historic victory.

The state Supreme Court justice, Kimberly O’Connor, found the Department of Health, in months of shilly shallying designed to dodge the Empire Center’s requests, had broken the law. It gave the state five days to disgorge what Mr. Hammond & Co. had been seeking, and for good measure, ordered the state to pay their legal costs. It’s hard to recall a freedom-of-information victory in Albany so consequential.

Within days the scale and the ghastliness of the government’s default, and coverup, began to come into view. The Empire Center has put up on the Internet an illuminating timeline on this head. It underscores, among other things, just how thoroughly, in this era of retreat from old-fashioned journalistic standards, Mr. Hammond and his colleagues scooped so many of us in the general press.

What Mr. Hammond is calling for today is an end to all the dodging. “No Freedom of Information requests. No lawsuits. No subpoenas,” he writes. “Give public information to the public.” He notes that the idea was put forward in a letter spearheaded by a group called Reinvent Albany, which focuses on transparency, and co-signed by the Empire Center and seven other watchdog groups.

Writes Mr. Hammond: “Let the state account for every test, infection, hospitalization and death — with names removed but dates and ZIP codes included — and post all of it on the web in database format. Then let the people inspect and crunch the numbers themselves, rather than taking the word of a governor who has been gaslighting them for almost a year.”

Mr. Hammond argues that the power of the concept was proved in the freedom-of-information lawsuit. The order it won forced the Health Department to release what Mr. Hammond calls “complete and detailed data on nursing home deaths.” Within days, Mr. Hammond writes, his colleague Ian Kingsbury and he were able to shed new light on the Cuomo administration’s “infamous” “guidance.”

That guidance, dated exactly a year ago, forbade nursing homes from rejecting Covid-positive patients being discharged from hospitals. Messrs. Hammond and Kingsbury then did the grim “statistical correlation between admissions under that policy and higher death rates in the nursing homes that received them.” It could yet bring a premature end to Mr. Cuomo’s governorship.

Yet we are stuck in what Mr. Hammond calls an “infuriating status quo.” The Health Department “has shared with the public only a fraction of what it knows about the pandemic. The governor continues cherry-picking and filtering the data for political gain. The Legislature fulminates fecklessly.” The big news today is that Albany has struck a deal to — wait for it — legalize marijuana.

What a mockery at a time when thousands of New Yorkers, including many of its most productive citizens, are fleeing to the tax haven of Florida. Could Mr. Cuomo seize the sunlight Mr. Hammond has opened up (and upstage Senator Schumer and other Democrats baying for him to quit)? Either way, the Empire Center has set the stage for historic reforms in the Empire State.

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Image: “Speaks to Clouds,” Atlantic Beach, N.Y., 2007. (c) James M. Peaslee.


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