Submitted Photo Dr. Mary Bassett, recently confirmed state health commissioner, is pictured during a December press conference with Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Dr. Mary Bassett has been New York’s health commissioner since late December.

She will remain in that post after her recent state Senate confirmation along party lines, 43-20. Not only did no Republicans vote for Bassett’s confirmation, they loudly protested some of Bassett’s more controversial public statements. First on state Sen. George Borrello’s list of issues with Bassett is the health commissioner’s position on drug policy.

“I certainly agree with Senator (Liz) Krueger that she has an impressive resume, Dr. Bassett, and that she certainly seems qualified,” said Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay. “But this job is to be the chief public health officer of New York state. Public health should be something that is not politicized, but unfortunately what we’ve seen is her taking some very politicized stances on what should be a public health issues. It’s already been mentioned about her support for public injection sites and the decriminalization of all illicit drugs. New York state has been suffering from a crisis of overdoses. People are dying literally every day and we have a public health official who believes we should be decriminalizing the very drugs that people have succumbed to. That’s concerning to me.”

Shortly after Bassett took office as acting health commissioner in December, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration announced non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor for COVID-19 because longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from the virus.

William Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor and director of the university’s Securities Law Clinic, filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Albany seeking to stop the directive on the grounds that it is patently unconstitutional because it uses racial preferences to determine if someone qualifies for the treatments.

“She’s also politicized the office already by making a rec that doctors instead of looking at a patient individually based solely on their need for lifesaving therapuetics for COVID treatment, that we should consider superficial issues like the person’s skin color or ethnicitiy,” Borrello said. “And while those are certainly factors from an epidemiological perspective, at the end of the day doctors are supposed to deliver life-saving medication to the people that need it most, not based on superficial determinations.”

Bassett is a former New York City health commissioner who spent 17 years developing AIDS prevention programs in Zimbabwe. She had served as director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and was a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She was named acting state health commissioner in December, succeeding Dr. Howard Zucker, who resigned in September. Zucker was roundly criticized for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including the Cuomo administration’s decision to downplay the extent of how many people were dying of COVID-19, particularly in nursing homes.

Borrello also took issue with a statement Bassett made during meetings with senators on the idea to create an Office of Gun Control within the state Health Department. The Sunset Bay Republican particularly took issue with a joke in which Bassett said she would have to change the office’s name because some state legislators are “allergic to talking about gun violence.”

“Not only was that a divisive comment to the people that are supposed to be voting on her nomination, it’s quite frankly pretty untrue,” Borrello said. “We would all like to talk about gun violence. Where we differ is what causes the gun violence. I firmly believe it’s the people behind the gun, the people that we’re not putting in jail, the people that we’re letting out over and over again. What is the public health answer to revolving door criminal justice? I suggest that this not a public health issue, but a poor policy issue that has been spread like a disease by this body. So i would ask Dr. Bassett to set aside the politics, her far left background and instead focus on the very important job of protecting the health and welfare of New Yorkers, which by the way has been created in the last two years in this pandemic and also with the very bad policies that have come out of Albany. I’ll be voting no, but still being hopeful that she can turn that ship around.”