NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams rips Cuomo on anniversary of her dad's COVID-19 death

City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams delivered an emotional speech on Thursday at Elmhurst Hospital to mark the fifth anniversary of her father’s death from COVID-19, linking one of the darkest moments in her life to then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s leadership during the pandemic.

Adams spoke beside a framed photo of her father, Irvin, as she unleashed her most direct and personal attack on Cuomo, the front-runner in the Democratic primary less than five weeks away. Her remarks came two days after reports said the Department of Justice was investigating Cuomo for possibly lying to Congress about his response to the outbreak in nursing homes.

The two rivals are courting Black voters in southeast Queens and central Brooklyn, constituencies considered crucial to any successful Democratic mayoral candidate. Adams remains a distant third in polls, far behind Cuomo.

“ These are the politicians who visit when they need votes, but have never lived here. Who talk about our struggle, but have never suffered with us. Who see our political value but never see our pain,” Adams said, referring to the Black community. “ Is Andrew Cuomo the only one at fault? Not really. He didn't create this kind of politics. He just mastered it.”

Cuomo’s campaign strongly disputed Adams’ criticism and shared statements from pastors who praised his response to the pandemic.

“When our health care system was falling apart, Andrew Cuomo was there providing real and tangible support through resources without missing underserved communities,” the Rev. Greg Merriweather of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Manhattan said in a statement. “Anyone saying otherwise is misinformed or misinterpreting our experience.”

Adams recalled when she and her sister visited her father in his Jackson Heights apartment in late March 2020. He was sitting on his bed, having difficulty breathing and struggling to put a shirt over his head. Paramedics told them he needed to be hospitalized, but they couldn’t take him to Elmhurst Hospital, which was just nine minutes away. The hospital was at capacity. No beds were available.

Instead, Adams said they took Irvin to Long Island Jewish Medical Center, where they dropped him off in the parking lot. The facility was only allowing patients and medical staff inside due to COVID-19 restrictions.

“ The parking lot was the last place I saw my beautiful father,” Adams said.

Her father was one of more than 30,000 people who died of COVID-19 in New York City between March and May of that year. She argued that Cuomo mismanaged the response to the crisis, contributing to deaths like her father's.

“In the nine years before the pandemic, state funding was quietly pulled from hospitals like Elmhurst to make room for other priorities,” Adams said solemnly.

Her speech came the same week the Cuomo campaign released two ads touting his leadership during the pandemic.

The two campaigns’ conflicting portrayals of the grim period in New York City history hinted at a question that's likely to be front and center at mayoral debates next month: Was Cuomo the leader New York needed at the height of the pandemic?

In March 2020, the New York Times reported that New York hospitals faced $400 million in state cuts proposed by a panel convened by Cuomo to address the cost of the state’s ballooning Medicaid program. Those cuts came on top of a decade of hospital closures across the city, including St. John’s Hospital in Elmhurst and Mary Immaculate Hospital in Jamaica.

The Cuomo campaign cited figures showing struggling hospitals like Elmhurst recorded an uptick in funding during Cuomo’s tenure, including a $412 million increase between fiscal years 2016 and 2020. The campaign blamed the city budget for any lack of funding.

But Adams did not just call out Cuomo’s cuts to hospitals. She said he also withheld personal protective equipment and vaccines from certain areas, depending on whether they were under city or state control. Cuomo’s years in office were marked by a vicious feud with then-Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“ I remember begging then-Gov. Cuomo, begging his office to send lifesaving vaccines to my community and for weeks and months our request was denied no matter what we said,” Adams said. “Because the site where the vaccines were supposed to go was run by then-Mayor de Blasio, the former governor's political enemy.”

In an interview arranged by the Cuomo campaign, Jennifer Jones Austin, executive director of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, praised the former governor for his leadership turning houses of worship into hubs helping people endure the outbreak.

“I remember well being surprised when talking with faith leaders in the very early stages of the COVID pandemic about how they were standing up in their churches with the support of the Cuomo administration testing facilities, informational forums,” Austin said.

Bill Hammond, a health policy expert at the good government group the Empire Center, questioned Adams’ criticisms of Cuomo. The former governor’s fiscal decisions did not correlate with COVID deaths, he said.

"If spending money on hospitals and Medicaid were an effective way to fight pandemics, New York City would have had one of the country’s lowest fatality rates instead of one of the worst," Hammond said.