This spring New York City marks five somber years since its first confirmed COVID-19 case, a cruel virus that disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities.
Every day since, we keep praying for the victims and their families, and I encourage my congregants to find solace in faith that from those darkest depths, we emerged. Yet as families continue to grieve, and I do my best to guide them through the healing of prayer, it pains me to see the pandemic still being politicized.
In what should be a moment to reflect and pay tribute to the heroes and first responders that came to our rescue, I am deeply offended by those who are trying to rewrite history for their own personal gain. Worse, they have taken a page out of the Trump playbook by spreading lies about Andrew Cuomo’s record on communities of color.
Even during election season, elected officials have a responsibility to engage in honest debate, grounded in facts, not twist the truth to suit their own candidacies. But in these past few weeks, we have witnessed a series of salacious falsehoods designed to misappropriate blame in a concerted effort to revise history, especially regarding vaccine distribution to communities of color.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams — who is running for mayor against Cuomo — falsely claims that he delayed life-saving COVID-19 vaccines to the Black community. That simply isn’t true.
Few people want to remember this dark time in our history, but here are the facts. The initial vaccine rollout from the federal government was chaotic and unpredictable. In January 2021, the Trump administration created a supply bottleneck, where states were not getting the allocations they were promised. At one point, New York was getting 100,000 less doses a week than was expected.
Despite these hardships, Cuomo prioritized vaccine distribution in our communities. He deployed vaccines and supplies to local houses of worship like mine at First Baptist Church of East Elmhurst, among others in Queens. He stood up clinics at NYCHA complexes. And he opened mass vaccination sites at Aqueduct Racetrack, and York College in Queens, Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
Cuomo also recognized the skepticism that exists in some corners of our community surrounding vaccinations and large government initiatives. To that end, he launched a sizable targeted public information campaign to encourage taking the COVID vaccine in partnership with the faith-based community on a statewide effort.
He went further, making a personal commitment not to take the vaccine until it was widely available to us.
When push came to shove, Cuomo brought together a coalition of groups to call upon the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to establish a fair and equitable federal vaccination program. We remember how the federal distribution program ignored Black, Brown, Asian and poor communities when it came to delivering the vaccine. Because communities of color disproportionately suffer from pre-existing conditions, Black Americans died at twice the rate of white Americans.
Not only did he call upon federal officials to act, Cuomo threatened to bring legal action against the Trump administration to prevent an unequal distribution of the COVID vaccine to lower income and Black and Brown communities.
To the governor, this was a civil rights issue as much as it was a matter of life and death. Those that were first on the list of who died from COVID should not be last on the list of who received the vaccine.
I know the public has short memories and maybe I shouldn’t be as bothered by this attempt to rewrite history as I am. After all — this is politics.
But to me, it’s personal. I was there and worked closely with Cuomo and his administration at the peak of the pandemic. I saw the care and attention that he gave to our neighborhoods. And I also can’t help to feel that this revisionist history erases the good work we in the faith-based community did to tend to our flocks and help navigate them through this once in a century pandemic.
We were all in this together.
Today, our city is at a critical point, and we do not need more division and political folly, we need a proven and trusted ally, and we have that in Cuomo. His leadership will meet the movement, bring communities together, fight to educate and deliver facts before the politics, and will create a more affordable and equitable New York City.
Young serves as the eighth pastor of the First Baptist Church of Corona, in East Elmhurst.
