September 14, 2021
The Honorable Kathy Hochul
Governor of New York State
New York State Capitol Building
Albany, NY 12224
Dear Governor Hochul,
As members of the Ending the HIV Epidemic (EtE) Community Coalition,[1] we are pleased to welcome you to your new office and look forward to working with your administration at this moment when our State faces unprecedented public health challenges and opportunities. We write to urge you to take immediate steps to restore and renew the critical leadership role of the New York State Department of Health by appointing new leadership, and to offer our strong support for your consideration of Mary T. Bassett, MD, MPH, as New York State Commissioner of Health.
As you know, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic continues to have a profound impact on all New Yorkers, and we applaud the steps you have already taken to mitigate the economic harm by extending the moratorium on evictions and speeding the delivery of assistance to households hardest hit by the crisis. Despite significant progress in vaccinating New Yorkers, the rise of the delta variant and third New York surge make it clear that our COVID-19 response is far from over. Most troubling is the persistence of the stark disparities in COVID-19 risk and health outcomes in our State, with Black, Latinx and low-income communities bearing a disproportionate burden of infections, serious illness, and death. The inequities in health outcomes apparent from the earliest days of the pandemic continue to be reflected as lower rates of vaccine uptake in low-income communities of color, and in particular among Black New Yorkers. The COVID-19 pandemic has also negatively impacted progress on other critical NYS public health priorities, including HIV, hepatitis C, and the opioid crisis, which are all characterized by the same persistent health inequities.
We believe that strong new leadership is needed in order to renew our efforts to best meet these public health challenges. Among other concerns, we believe that the NYS COVID-19 response to date has failed to capitalize on the potential for engaging partners at the community level to address and overcome the challenges that contribute to poor health outcomes. The close connection of NYS DOH leadership to controversies surrounding the New York State COVID response, and the departures of long-time NYS DOH staff, have also undermined community confidence, contributing to distrust.
Dr. Mary Bassett has precisely the expertise necessary to confront New York’s unprecedented public health challenges and effectively address persistent disparities. With more than 30 years of experience devoted to promoting health equity and social justice, both in the United States and abroad, Dr. Bassett’s career has spanned academia, government, and not-for-profit work. From 2014 to August 2018, Dr. Bassett served as Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she made racial justice a priority and worked to address the structural racism at the root of the city’s persistent gaps in health between white New Yorkers and communities of color.
She left DOHMH to become Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights as well as the FXB professor of the practice of health and human rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. At the FXB Center, the first academic center to focus exclusively on health and human rights, Dr. Bassett directs interdisciplinary approaches that combine research and teaching with a strong commitment to service and policy development, to promote health equity and human rights for those oppressed by racism, poverty and stigma.
While DOHMH Commissioner, Dr. Bassett led effective City responses to Ebola, Legionnaires’ disease, Zika, and the opioid epidemic, placed an unprecedented focus on mental health, and concentrated efforts in select neighborhoods with particularly poor health outcomes. She pushed DOHMH to see all public health work through a more racially sensitive lens, calling attention to the disparate impact of infectious diseases as well as chronic diseases that plagued low-income communities of color. As Commissioner, Dr. Bassett was praised for promoting neighborhood-based solutions to pressing public health concerns, and for seeking and fostering dialogue and engagement with the community. She adopted a more decentralized public health approach, increasing DOHMH’s neighborhood presence with Neighborhood Health Action Centers that bring resources into low-income communities, and began reissuing community health that document neighborhood level data, providing an easy way to measure metrics, compare communities and see where resources are needed most.
Responding to Ebola, Dr. Bassett was widely acclaimed for her calm demeanor and focus on facts, for effectively engaging the NYC West African community, and for clearly communicating the distinction between national origin and the risk related to travel history. She held numerous local community meetings about Legionnaires outbreaks, and implemented first in the nation cooling tower maintenance requirements. DOHMH focused Zika educational outreach on communities with ties to Caribbean, used data to identify and fix under-testing in these communities, briefed ethnic newspapers serving those at risk, and held community meetings to discuss the response and gather input.
Under Dr. Bassett’s leadership, DOHMH identified an increase in opioid overdose deaths among Black and Latino people, so adopted a whole-city approach to boost the overdose response to include enhanced surveillance, expanded naloxone distribution, syringe exchange and access to treatment. She expanded and enhanced the city’s HIV response, including revisioning DOHMH sexually transmitted disease clinics as sexual health centers providing HIV prophylaxis and treatment. Cognizant of often poor management of chronic diseases such as asthma and diabetes, under Dr. Bassett’s guidance the health department restored the practice of “public health detailing,” sending advisers out into the community to support doctors in their practice and help them engage with their patients. DOHMH also maintained efforts to reduce non-communicable disease, such as raising the pack price of cigarettes, and introducing sodium warming labels.
During an earlier term at DOHMH, in 2002 Dr. Bassett was appointed Deputy Commissioner of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. While in that role, she led the division responsible for NYC’s pioneering tobacco control interventions and food policy, including the nation’s first calorie posting requirements and trans fat restrictions. Her signature program was the launch of District Public Health Offices in several neighborhoods long harmed by racial/ethnic and economic health inequities. These offices now lead targeted, multi-sectoral, multi-agency strategies to reduce excess burden of disease. Dr. Bassett was also one of the prime movers behind the city’s “Talk to Your Baby” campaign, encouraging parents to talk, read, and sing to their babies to bolster brain development.
A native of New York City, Dr. Bassett received her B.A. in History and Science from Harvard University and her M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. She served her medical residency at Harlem Hospital Center and has a master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Washington, where she was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. Early in her career, Dr. Bassett lived in Zimbabwe for nearly 20 years, where she served on the medical faculty of the University of Zimbabwe. She also worked as Associate Director of Health Equity at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Southern Africa Office, and as the Program Director for the African Health Initiative and the Child Well-being Program at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Dr. Bassett’s awards and honors include the Frank A. Calderone Prize in Public Health, a Kenneth A. Forde Lifetime Achievement Award from Columbia University, a Victoria J. Mastrobuono Award for Women’s Health, and the National Organization for Women’s Champion of Public Health Award. In 2017, Dr. Bassett was elected to become a member of the National Academy of Medicine. For many years she served as an associate editor of the American Journal of Public Health. Her recent publications include articles in The Lancet and in the New England Journal of Medicine addressing structural racism and health inequities in the United States.
As researchers, providers, and advocates committed to promoting the health of all New Yorkers, we look forward to working with you towards a more effective and equitable public health policies and practices. As individuals and organizations that have worked closely with Dr. Mary Bassett, we strongly believe she would be an innovative and effective leader of these efforts. We thank you for your consideration and urge you to consider Dr. Bassett for the position of Commissioner of the New York State Department of Health.
Yours truly,
ACRIA
ACT UP
AIDS Healthcare Foundation
AIDS Service Center NYC
Albany Damien Center
Albany Medical Center, Division of HIV Medicine
American College of Physicians, New York Chapter
Amida Care
APICHA Community Health Center
BOOM! Health
Brooklyn Community Pride Center
Center for Health, Identity, Behavior and Prevention Studies (CHIBPS)
Community Health Action of Staten Island
Community Minority Affairs
NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation
Correctional Association of New York, Prison Visiting Project
Empire State Pride Agenda
Erie County Department of Health
Evergreen Health Services
Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC)
Harlem United
Harm Reduction Coalition
Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS)
HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies
NY State Psychiatric Institute
Housing Works, Inc.
Hudson River Health Care (HRHCare)
Hispanic Health
Iris House
Latino Commission on AIDS
Legal Action Center
Lenox Hill Retroviral Disease Center, NYC
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center (The Center)
Long Island GLBT Services Network
Montefiore Medical Center, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women’s Health, Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine
Mount Sinai Hospital, Institute for Advanced Medicine and the HIV/AIDS Education and Training Program
Mount Sinai Institute for Advanced Medicine/Spencer Cox Center for Health
Mt Sinai Beth Israel, Baron Edmond de Rothschild Chemical Dependency Institute
Nassau County Department of Health
National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, Inc. (NBLCA)
New York Academy of Medicine
New York State Association of County Health Officials (NYSACHO)
NY State Psychiatric Institute, HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies
NYS Academy of Family Physicians
NYS AIDS Advisory Council Chair
NYU College of Nursing, Center for Drug Use and HIV Research
Riverstone Consulting
Ryan/Chelsea-Clinton Community Health Center
Southern Tier AIDS Program
Sun River Health
The Fortune Society, Inc.
The MOCHA Center, Inc.
The Nurse Practitioner Association New York State
Treatment Action Group (TAG)
Trillium Health
Medical Society of the State of New York, Infectious Disease Committee
Truth Pharm
Unity Fellowship of Christ, NYC
VNSNY CHOICE SelectHealth
VOCAL - NY
[1] The ETE Community Coalition is a group of over 90 health care centers, hospitals, and community-based organizations across the State that are fully committed to realizing the goals of our historic New York State Blueprint for ending our HIV/AIDS epidemic by dramatically reducing new HIV infections and ending AIDS deaths.
