Manhattan Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou has made bold claims of delivering pandemic aid and “saving lives,” but the numbers don’t always add up.
The progressive Democrat who represents the Lower East Side, Chinatown and the Financial District and wants to run for state Senate, has tweeted an impressive — and sometimes hard to fathom — list of accomplishments.
In January 2022, she claimed in a tweet that she and her team had given out “over a million masks and over a million meals” during COVID.
A few days later she tweeted that “my staff has personally saved lives of people in our district and beyond … and passed out millions of meals and PPE.”
The mask number fluctuated from more than a half a million she claimed in an Aug. 28, 2020 tweet, to more than a quarter million on a podcast in October 2020.
During the pandemic lockdown, she tweeted about distributing hot meals from the 46 Mott bakery in Chinatown — and those claims quickly mushroomed from 120 meals a day on April 25, 2020, to 450 a day on May 9, 2020. But the bakery’s own count was reported to be 150 a day in early May 2020.
One Chinatown property owner said Niou’s endless social media posts felt “performative” and unnecessary.
“I believe that showing yourself on social media hand delivering food, that’s great for one or two photos,” said Jan Lee. “But during the pandemic or during an emergency, we actually expect you to be doing the work that you’re elected to do, which is to legislate or find the faults with the system that creates food insecurity.”
Niou, who holds the seat once occupied by the late Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver, decided not to seek re-election in order to challenge incumbent Sen. Brian Kavanagh in June’s Democratic primary.
While seeking re-election to the Assembly in 2020 as the pandemic raged, Niou said in a tweet and interview that she would not be doing any fundraising or campaigning.
But Niou participated in at least 10 virtual fundraisers in May and June 2020, including a Zoom movie night and an event promising “cocktails, crazy hats and conversation.”
Niou took heat in January for a tweet that described uniformed and mostly maskless NYPD officers taking the subway after the funeral of slain cop Jason Rivera as putting on a “frightening show of intimidation” and creating “a massive health risk.” She also liked a tweet describing the officers’ attendance at the funeral as “their fascism rally on the streets above.”
The assemblywoman’s “extensive work supporting Lower Manhattan families and seniors with both meals and PPE’s [sic] throughout the pandemic is well-documented and recorded,” said Niou’s campaign spokesman Max Burns. “Any suggestion otherwise is false, and shows the desperation of the absent establishment. They failed, where she delivered.”
He did not provide any documentation of that work.