It wasn’t as if the president had to win over anyone in that room; they all loved him before he showed up. They loved him even more after he showed up and spoke. Two hours of handshaking didn’t get him one additional fan or vote. He had them all. But he did it anyway. I’ve never forgotten that message, and I truly appreciate the human and emotional connection with the people I serve.
One afternoon I was speaking with a young state assemblyman, and he asked me how I got people to connect with me during briefings. I said it can be simply stated. If you want people to open up to you, you open up to them first. Open your heart; show your emotion, your truth, your vulnerability, your humanity. I told my kids all their lives, “Give love, get love,” but you have to “give” it first. No one wants to go first. It risks rejection. But it’s the only way.
The assemblyman then asked me, as he was just starting out, what advice I could give him. I had been in a reflective mood, so I gave him more than he expected. I said that government is actually a more substantive trade than many young people now appreciate. It’s not about just having an opinion or identifying a wrong that needs to be righted. Every student in a college-level political science course can do that. You must understand the issue from all dimensions, understand the complexities and the consequences. Too many opinions now are only “tweet deep.” You then need to know how to make change: how to get it done from the legislative perspective, but even more, how the change would then be implemented. How do you make it happen and how do you make it happen with no unintended consequences? Raising problems without effecting solutions is pointless, if not counterproductive. I said, look at the extraordinary baseball players: They are “complete players.” You must be a power hitter who can also bunt. A fielder who can also run bases. In government you must be a strong advocate but also know how to manage, execute, compromise, and forge consensus. Criticism is easy. Construction is hard.
More than two decades later, President Clinton and I talked about the pressure and the consequences of my situation, and then he passed on a piece of information. He knew a lot of people in big pharma through his work to bring necessary drugs to Africa for many years. He told me that people whom he respected suggested that remdesivir was a drug that might be helpful against coronavirus and that our Department of Health should check it out.
After the call, I phoned Dr. Zucker and told him what the president had said. Zucker had also heard about remdesivir and agreed it might be helpful. He said he would call the FDA and ask what they thought. I followed up a few days later, and he told me that the FDA was reviewing studies.
Fast-forward approximately three and a half months. The HHS secretary, Alex Azar, says on national TV during the last week of June that the administration will be buying a drug that they recently discovered and that showed promise. What was the name of the drug? Remdesivir. All those weeks wasted obsessing over hydroxychloroquine, and there was an existing drug that actually worked which they knew about months before.
MARCH 31 | 9,298 NEW CASES | 10,929 HOSPITALIZED | 332 DEATHS
“The main battle is at the apex; we’re still going up the mountain.”
WE WERE STILL TWO TO four weeks from the apex of this mountain we were climbing, and we were all tired. A month of bad news, our lifestyles disrupted, and nobody knew when it was going to get better, not even the president, who was harping on reopening the country by Easter, less than two weeks away.
The nation was realizing the disparity in the infection rate between lower-income communities and higher-income communities. Luckily, in New York the disparity was much less than other states across the nation. We were testing more people than any state in the country, even more per capita than China and South Korea. New York City had an infection rate of about 19 percent. The infection rate among the Black community and the Latino community was about 23 percent; in some states there was a nearly 50 percent differential. We wanted to ensure that every New Yorker was getting all the help they needed. We were increasing testing and services in Black and brown communities and made special efforts in public housing. Our greatest challenge was in New York City’s crowded public housing. In these areas special teams were going door to door to offer people testing and information on social distancing, masks, and precautions.
The high-infection areas were what we called hot-spot zip codes. The highest infection rate hot spots had an infection rate of approximately 50 percent. Corona, Queens, which is served by Elmhurst Hospital, was one of those hot spots. Elmhurst made national news when it was overwhelmed with patients and suffered a severe shortage of supplies. It was an eye-opener on several levels. Elmhurst is a community that comprises many new immigrants and low-income people. It is a community that did not have as much access to health care and had many underlying illnesses. It was also a community suffering from a housing shortage, with many new immigrants living in tight quarters.
Elmhurst is a public hospital as opposed to a private hospital. In downstate New York, there are approximately one hundred hospitals with about ninety “privately run” and eleven “public” hospitals operated by the City of New York. While we had understood that it would be a challenge to get the private hospitals to work together, we didn’t know
