Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, has always embodied a dark irony of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Cuomo’s state has a higher death toll than anywhere else in America and his austerity-driven politics continue to cripple public institutions, he has won hysterical praise from many of the nation’s leading newspapers, magazines, and television shows. People have literally declared themselves “Cuomosexuals” and hawked his merchandise on Etsy. The inexplicable cult of worship, birthed at the height of the pandemic in New York last spring, has managed to linger on through the carnage.

Cuomo’s failure to contain the virus in the earliest weeks of the outbreak doomed New York to far more suffering than it needed to endure. Now, with a vaccine here, he is again proving his lack of fitness to lead New York through the worst crisis it has faced in modern history. For weeks, unused vaccine doses have sat in freezers, with some even being thrown out. After imposing extremely complex and rigid guidelines over who can receive a vaccine, Cuomo threatened health care providers with million-dollar fines if they didn’t follow the rules he had created for who can get a shot first.

While it’s understandable that Cuomo would want to ensure that health care workers and nursing home residents received the vaccine in priority, his determination to wield maximal control over the operation has only slowed the process down. County executives who had been ready to deploy vaccines at local health departments, schools, churches, and firehouses were told that only hospitals could be vaccination sites. No locality could attempt to dole out vaccines faster than Cuomo would allow. If New York City or any town wanted to vaccinate a sick elderly person not in one of Cuomo’s priority groups, they were immediately blocked.