Screaming bloody murder, police unions are demanding the ouster of Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot after reports she told a top NYPD official “I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops” in the midst of a heated argument over the allocation of then-scarce face masks in March.
Her choice of words was awful, but in tense times, rat feces happens. Barbot wasn’t trying to hoard masks; she wanted more for frontline health-care workers.
Yet passive-aggressive de Blasio leaves her dangling, when he clearly could’ve cleared matters up by now in private. Why?
We don’t claim Barbot has been a pillar of strength during the coronavirus storm. She and her department have stumbled plenty.
City epidemiologists missed COVID-19’s rampant spread in the weeks before the first official confirmed case. Incidences of a pediatric multi-symptom inflammatory syndrome were uncovered not by DOH, but by WNBC Channel 4. Barbot herself repeatedly minimized the risk of the virus in the critical early days.
Is that what’s bothering de Blasio? Unlikely, since he minimized the virus’ risk, and resisted strong social distancing measures, even more.
Maybe Hizzoner is steamed that staffers at Barbot’s department told the media that they were jumping up and down in early March, even as he was telling people to go about their lives.
Maybe that’s also what explains his perplexing decision to transfer responsibility for running the city’s massive contact tracing and testing efforts from the Health Department to the city’s public hospital system.
Speaking of rodents, maybe he’s not a manager but a mouse.
