Ditching the city
Health boss to leave amid cloud over lead
New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett will leave the de Blasio administration next month to take a job at Harvard, the city Health Department said Thursday.
Dr. Bassett, who brought to the city three decades of public health expertise and a desire to confront racial and economic inequities in the health system, was the face of the city's response to crises like a doctor being diagnosed with Ebola. But in recent weeks the agency, responsible for monitoring and responding to lead poisoning in children, has been embroiled in the city housing authority's growing lead paint scandal at the New York City Housing Authority.
Hizzoner insisted her departure had nothing to do with probes by the Department of Investigation and Controller Scott Stringer into the Health Department's handling of testing for lead in public housing.
“No, absolutely not. Look, that matter is an ongoing investigation,” Mayor de Blasio said. , and one that concerns the “flow information.”
He said Dr. Bassett's conversations with Harvard have been ongoing for “many months.”
In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control began advising public health officials to initiate an environmental investigation to determine the source of lead if a child under 6 registers a blood-level of 5 micrograms per deciliter.
But the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene — then under Mayor Michael Bloomberg — declined to adopt that standard and, instead, used a much higher standard of 10 micrograms to trigger a probe.
When Dr. Bassett arrived in January 2014, the DOH Health Department continued that policy and did not notify NYCHA or inspect the apartments of hundreds of children who registered 5 to 9 micrograms. By the end of 2016, there were 820 children living in NYCHA buildings with those levels.
In January, the Health Department reversed course and suddenly adopted the 5 microgram standardat NYCHA. After the Daily News revealed all of this last month, the agency began applying this standard to non-NYCHA apartments as well.
Bassett will lead the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights and the François-Xavier Bagnoud professor of the practice of health and human rights at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.
The agency Health Department will be led by Dr. Oxiris Barbot, who will serve as Acting Health Commissioner. Barbot has been first deputy since early 2014 and was previously health commissioner in Baltimore. De Blasio praised Dr. Bassett as a steady hand who helped combat the opioid epidemic, created The Center for Health Equity to address disparities and worked to provide increased mental health services. But Dr. Bassett might be best known to New Yorkers for leading the city's response when a city doctor was diagnosed with Ebola he caught while treating patients in Africa. Officials across the river in New Jersey quarantined a nurse with Ebola in an airport parking lot, while the New York City patient was treated at Bellevue Hospital — and Dr. Bassett and de Blasio visited a restaurant he'd been at days earlier to calm people's nerves.
“She was an extraordinarily calm and clear and methodical voice addressing really complex issues, most notably the Ebola crisis, which I think for all of us was the ultimate in uncharted territory. Mary Basset, at that moment, really was particularly a powerful and important voice in the city, helping everyone to understand the disease and recognizing how we would work our way through that crisis, and we did.”