State Health Commissioner Antonia Novello startled some officials attending a Hispanic legislators’ conference in Albany last weekend with a bawdy joke about Hispanic men not needing Viagra, The Post has learned.
Offering a mock apology to the crowd for having ended state funding for Viagra, Novello cracked that Latin men don’t need it anyway because “they have other ways of performing.”
“I was floored,” said one official who attended a conference breakfast Saturday for about 100 people at the governor’s mansion.
“It was the most inappropriate thing I ever heard,” added the official. “There was a gasp in the room when she said that.” But the co-chairmen of the 19th annual session of Somos El Futuro, insisted the comment was in the good fun and was hardly offensive.
“She said, ‘I apologize for taking Viagra out [of the Medicaid program], but Hispanic men don’t need it anyway. You figure out other ways of performing,” Assemblyman Peter Rivera (D-Bronx) quoted the commissioner saying. “She was very good, very clever, very witty, very funny. She had the room rolling.”
State Sen. Efrain Gonzalez (D-Bronx), the other co-chairman, backed up Rivera’s version of events.
Novello told The Post she intended only to recognize the accomplishments of the Hispanic leaders in the audience.
“Our No. 1 priority was to come together and to celebrate the accomplishments of Hispanic leaders in the area of arts, literature and music,” she said.