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In a deeply personal speech, Ms. Adams, who is running for mayor, will speak about her father’s death from Covid in 2020. She says that as governor, Mr. Cuomo “failed him.”
May 22, 2025Updated 10:32 a.m. ET
The case for Adrienne Adams’s bid to become mayor of New York City began in the parking lot of a suburban hospital where she last saw her father alive.
More than five years ago, in March 2020, Ms. Adams and her sister drove their father, who was infected with Covid-19, to Long Island Jewish Medical Center as the pandemic grew. He had been turned away at the overcrowded and understaffed Elmhurst Hospital, which was closer to his home.
With restrictions in place that prevented visitors, Ms. Adams, then a city councilwoman, gave her father a hug before he was wheeled into the hospital on Long Island. He succumbed to the disease eight weeks later.
On Thursday, the fifth anniversary of her father’s death, Ms. Adams will deliver a campaign speech at Elmhurst Hospital that will draw a line between her family’s tragedy and what she will describe as mismanagement by the state’s governor at the time, Andrew M. Cuomo, now the leading candidate in the Democratic mayoral primary.
Ms. Adams will say in the speech that her father, an Air Force veteran, “served his government with pride. But when he needed his government to serve him, it failed him. And it didn’t fail him by accident. It failed him by design.”
Ms. Adams, now the City Council speaker, was a last-minute entrant to New York’s Democratic mayoral primary after urging from influential supporters that included the state attorney general, Letitia James, who has since endorsed her.
