TOP DOC QUITS, RIPS BUNGLING BLAZ
DEPARTS IN MIDST OF PANDEMIC OVER CITY SHUNNING HER EXPERTISE
Often referred to as “The City’s Doctor,” pediatrician-turned-pandemic medical adviser Dr. Oxiris Barbot resigned as health commissioner Tuesday, the culmination of months of conflict with Mayor de Blasio over the city’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
“I am proud that as a woman of color raised in public housing in this city, I always put public health, racial equity and the well-being of the city I love first,” she wrote Health Department staff in an email informing them of her decision.
“That ethos continues within the agency and I have every confidence that you will continue to serve every day with dignity, integrity and courage for the benefit of all New Yorkers,” she added.
Barbot reportedly resigned in protest over the mayor’s handling of the crisis.
“I leave my post today with deep disappointment that during the most critical public health crisis in our lifetime, that the Health Department’s incomparable disease control expertise was not used to the degree it could have been,” she wrote in her resignation letter to the mayor, according to The New York Times.
“Our experts are world-renowned for their epidemiology, surveillance and response work,” she continued. “The city would be well served by having them at the strategic center of the response, not in the background.”
De Blasio played down the criticism, saying at a news conference, “In any team, there’s going to be different viewpoints, but the most important thing is the product, the most important thing is the outcome.
“I believe that that expertise is real and deeply appreciated,” he added.
Hizzoner denied that tension between him and top health officials hampered the city’s initial response to the outbreak. The virus had infected 222,840 New Yorkers, killing 23,556, as of Monday, according to Health Department stats, though the outbreak has slowed down in recent months.
“There’s a difference between tension and different viewpoints,” de Blasio said. “There’s always different viewpoints.”
Dr. Dave Chokshi succeeds Barbot as commissioner and comes from city Health and Hospitals, where he was most recently chief population officer.
“For us to succeed, I’ll need to listen to and learn from what I know is the finest Health Department in the country even as I lead them,” Chokshi said.
De Blasio called the appointment “an opportunity to rejuvenate ... an opportunity to rethink and go forward with better approaches.”
But City Councilman Mark Levine, the chair of the Council’s Health Committee, called Barbot’s resignation “deeply disturbing.”
“The job of public health leaders is to stand up for policy based on science, even if that policy is not politically popular,” the Manhattan Democrat told the Daily News. “Dr. Barbot did that, to her enormous credit. It is why her departure is so worrisome.”
Barbot is a native Bronxite who became the city’s first Latina health commissioner in 2018, in the wake of an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.
Tension between her department and the mayor surfaced in mid-March, when top health officials threatened to resign over Hizzoner’s reluctance to shut down the city as the number of COVID cases climbed.
The relationship between Barbot and de Blasio only seemed to go downhill from there, with the health commissioner disappearing from the mayor’s daily coronavirus briefings and Hizzoner assigning responsibility for tracing the outbreak to Health and Hospitals. The move came even though the Health Department is viewed as a leader on carrying out that function.
In May, de Blasio seemed to side against Barbot amid reports of a heated exchange between her and NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan. She reportedly told Monahan, “I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops” as they argued over the phone about an unauthorized bid by officers to commandeer N95 masks, according to sources.
“No public servant should ever in any way say anything disrespectful about the men and women of the NYPD,” de Blasio said at the time.
On Tuesday, he thanked Barbot for “the important work she did during this crisis.”
“Everyone had to give their all, and I know she did to help us work our way through,” de Blasio said.