It’s fitting that the final day of Black History Month this year will feature a noon rally at SUNY Downstate in East Flatbush, where a group of political, labor, and religious leaders organized by Senator Zellnor Myrie are protesting against the planned closure of the hospital. History will not be kind to New York’s army of high-ranking Black pols if they lose the state-run complex, which includes schools of nursing, medicine, and public health, along with a web of community clinics and Brooklyn’s only kidney-transplant center.
Downstate has long been a lifeline to a low-income, medically underserved community where obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are out of control. Built to handle 60,000 visits a year, Downstate typically gets more than 200,000. Funding, never adequate, reached crisis levels during the pandemic, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo designated Downstate a COVID-only facility. News organizations reported how years of underfunding led desperate medical staff to start a GoFundMe page to scrounge up protective gear. Heartbreaking stories chronicled the heroism of Dr. James “Charlie” Mahoney, a legendary pulmonary and critical-care physician and professor who’d spent nearly 40 years at Downstate and died battling the epidemic.
“This is not a hypothetical. This is an actual fight for........