Today members of the COVID-19 Working Group – New York formally petitioned the Commissioner of Health for New York State, Dr. Howard A. Zucker, to exercise his legal authority and supervisory responsibility to require that NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio immediately return all authority for COVID-19 surveillance and contact tracing to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) as the legal public health entity for NYC. Mayor de Blasio’s ill-considered and perplexing decision to transfer this critical public health role from DOHMH, a world-class health department with a century of expertise and experience in contact tracing and infectious disease control, to Health + Hospitals, a critical NYC health care provider with zero experience and no infrastructure to conduct contact tracing, violates State and City law and unconscionably undermines the City’s COVID-19 response.

The petition sets out the legal framework that prohibits the Mayor’s unwise and unlawful transfer of contact tracing responsibilities from DOHMH to H+H, and outlines just some of the concrete and irreversible injuries the Mayor’s move would cause to individual New Yorkers, to the public health, and to the essential duties of DOHMH and H+H. Petitioners include the Deans of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and NYU School of Global Public Health, among others who, on behalf of all NYC residents, call upon the State Health Commissioner to require that the Mayor get out of the way and let DOHMH do its job.

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The COVID-19 Working Group – New York is a coalition of doctors, healthcare professionals, scientists, social workers, community workers, activists, and epidemiologists committed to a rapid and community-oriented response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.