NYC medical chief apologizes to the Orthodox community for mishandling outreach during the pandemic
Image by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
By Jacob Kornbluh February 23, 2021
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has learned from past mistakes and is seeking to improve outreach efforts to the Orthodox community in Brooklyn, two senior city officials said in a conference call with Jewish media representatives on Tuesday.
The acknowledgment — as the city is looking to rebuild trust in the COVID-19 vaccination drive — comes as community leaders and city politicians criticized City Hall for failing to communicate effectively about COVID-19 guidelines and restrictions during the pandemic.
“We haven’t gotten everything right — by any means,” Dr. Mitchell Katz, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, told the Forward on the call. “I think this administration really cares about the Orthodox Jewish community, and we’re sorry that it didn’t always get done correctly.”
“I don’t think it was ever an intentional mistake,” Katz added. “I think the important thing is, as we go forward, how do we do a better job?”
Katz also mentioned the passing of his Israeli father-in-law, the father of his partner Rabbi Igael “Iggy” Gurin-Malous, who died of COVID-19 in September in stressing how tough it has been for the city’s residents in the past year.
Dr. Dave Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner who himself recently recovered from the coronavirus, said the goal is “always to do better each day” and investing the time and the resources “for the legitimate partnership that comes from any successful public health campaign” to ensure “that we never return to those dark days of last March and April.”
Chokshi maintained that the city has learned from past experiences in improving outreach and collaboration with local leaders and media outlets during the vaccination campaign.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
