Mayor Bill de Blasio | Yana Paskova/Getty Images
It took a public health crisis of epic proportions to kick the long-simmering feud between Mayor Bill de Blasio and his health department into high gear.
On Friday Morning, as the mayor was publicly heaping praise on the doctor who runs the city’s public hospital system, top officials at the health agency conducted a somber daily staff briefing. They held a customary moment of silence before delving into the business of the day, including de Blasio’s decision to task the separate hospital agency with overseeing contact tracing — one of the most ambitious efforts underway to contain the coronavirus.
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“It sounded like a funeral,” said one of the staffers on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
During the meeting, no mention was made by Demetre Daskalakis, a leading doctor in the health department, of the latest blowup between de Blasio and the agency, which employs a team of contact tracers for moments like this. “It was just very somber,” the staffer said. “The people that were transferring out, he thanked them for their work.”
Meanwhile, the mayor took pains during his daily briefing with reporters to applaud Mitch Katz, the doctor running the city’s Health + Hospitals agency overseeing 11 public medical facilities. “Dr. Mitch Katz has worked miracles,” de Blasio said. “Anyone paying attention in the last few years has seen a stunning transformation. And he’s renowned all over the country.”
The mayor made no mention of Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, who broke custom by skipping the daily briefing. When asked about her notable absence he simply said Friday’s lineup “was to speak about the things that we’re talking about today.”
“My job is not to ensure people's happiness who work for 8.6 million New Yorkers. This is not about happiness. This is about effectiveness,” he added in response to a question about the health department’s anger at losing control over a key function of their mission.
The fast-spreading virus poses the most significant challenge the city’s health department has ever faced. And the stress of the crisis has revealed a longstanding fissure between the agency and the mayor, according to interviews with current and former officials in City Hall and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Some of it is stylistic — de Blasio reportedly resented Barbot’s predecessor, Mary Bassett, a Harvard-educated medical doctor who cared little for politics.
That feud peaked during a much smaller public health crisis, the 2015 outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease in the Bronx. De Blasio was infuriated that Bassett and other commissioners didn't provide an accounting of cooling towers that were central to the spread.
At one point he dispatched Dan Casey, an aide to former deputy mayor Tony Shorris, to the health department’s headquarters to demand data related to the outbreak. Casey made clear he was there on behalf of de Blasio. Barbot, then a deputy commissioner, escorted him to a room while she called lawyers to inquire about privacy concerns related to the nature of the request. Police guarded the room and Casey was then instructed to leave, according to three people familiar with the exchange.
“The mayor was elected to protect and advocate for New Yorkers — that’s what he did. He demanded more for his constituents and refused to rest on the way things had previously been done. This was about ensuring their safety and putting their fear at ease, not about press,” mayoral spokesperson Freddi Goldstein said about the account.
It was one of many tales of unrest in the unhappy marriage between de Blasio and the health department.
Health department staffers have recounted stories of City Hall micromanaging daily data dumps and press releases, as well as the agency's response to a 2019 measles outbreak in Orthodox Jewish areas where de Blasio has political ties.
At the outset of Covid-19, with those seeds of dissent long sown, the mayor leaned on Katz to the exclusion of Barbot, according to sources involved in the city's response. He initially balked at her insistence that he shut businesses and schools, a demand he did heed within a week of her advice.
Meanwhile she too provided mixed messages during news conferences about how the illness could be spread.
The cold war simmered for several weeks, but tensions boiled over when the mayor decided this week to give Health + Hospitals oversight of the contact tracers. He intends to hire a 1,000-person tracing army this month and beef it up to 2,500 people by the end of June. For starters, 40 health officials are moving over to the hospital agency, spokesperson Avery Cohen said.
Health staffers were furious.
“We’re the health department. We’re supposed to do this. That’s our job. But they took this away,” said one employee, who learned of the change during a daily staff call Thursday morning. “To take that away from a health authority that’s actively working on a response? They’re basically cutting off our hands.”
Bassett, who now runs a health center at Harvard University, balked at the move.
“This is a core activity and health departments know how to do it and they’ve been doing it for decades or more,” she said in an interview. “I don’t know of any hospital that does contact tracing. If there is one in the country I’m not aware of it.”
As Barbot’s influence with the mayor wanes, some people familiar with their relationship said the reemergence of infectious disease specialist Jay Varma has created a rival faction within the health department.
One person familiar with the matter, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity, described Varma as a “shadow commissioner” and said Barbot has “been sidelined.”
“Essentially we have two health commissioners, and the mayor likes one better,” the person said.
Local politicians jumped on the bandwagon of criticizing de Blasio.
“This plan raises a lot of alarm bells. Contact tracing is a core function of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and has been for years,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said. “This is a distraction when we need to be focused on battling this virus. The New York City Council will hold a hearing to get to the bottom of this and chart the best path forward.”
Dan Goldberg and Amanda Eisenberg contributed to this report.
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