New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s (D.) public health brain trust includes an accused Satanist who advised former president Joe Biden on the 2022-2023 monkeypox outbreak, the architect of the Empire State’s race-based COVID-19 policies, and a former city official who denied the NYPD’s request for masks during the pandemic.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis is one of the more notable names on Mamdani’s Committee on Health transition team. Daskalakis, a “Nasty Pig Hero,” first came to prominence as deputy commissioner for disease control in New York City, where he became “incident commander” for the city’s widely panned COVID-19 response. During his time in municipal government, his agency published graphic guidelines for having sex during the pandemic, including such practices as the use of glory holes.
“Make it a little kinky,” the guidance read. “Be creative with sexual positions and physical barriers, like walls, that allow sexual contact while preventing close face to face contact.”
Daskalakis became former president Joe Biden’s monkeypox czar in August 2022, immediately coming under fire after photos surfaced showing a large pentagram tattoo on his chest. The images came from his personal Instagram account, which consists in large part of shirtless photos of Daskalakis (who has denied being a Satanist).
During the monkeypox outbreak, Daskalakis took great pains to avoid condemning behavior that could lead to transmission of the disease, which primarily occurs among gay men. He told Americans in June 2023 that his team was “making sure [they] got the word out in a way that supports people’s joy, as opposed to calling them ‘risky.’”
“One person’s idea of ‘risk’ is another person’s idea of a great festival or Friday night,” he continued.
Biden monkeypox advisor Demetre Daskalakis says the Biden administration aims to “support peoples’ joy as opposed to calling them ‘risky'”:
“One person’s idea of risk is another person’s idea of a great festival or Friday night.” pic.twitter.com/nKsRQNmOwY
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 18, 2023
Daskalakis appeared to live by those words, flaunting his own attendance at a gay circuit party on Fire Island in August 2023.
The mayor-elect has already drawn scrutiny for appointing a series of radicals to his transition team, including a black nationalist who organized campaigns to free cop killers, a former Women’s March leader who was forced out of the group over anti-Semitism, and a “community safety” adviser who has called to abolish police, prisons, several federal law enforcement agencies, and borders themselves. Mamdani’s health advisers, though, are among a small number of those on his transition team with government experience.
Mamdani named Dr. Mary Bassett, a professor of health and human rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, to his transition team’s Committee on Health as well. Bassett served as acting commissioner of the New York State Department of Health in 2021 and 2022, where she designed the state’s policy of prioritizing non-white New Yorkers in its response to COVID-19.
Her office issued official guidelines in December 2021 for how best to distribute then-scarce allocations of COVID-19 therapeutic drugs Paxlovid and Molnupiravir. The New York State Department of Health stated that it would only offer the drugs to patients with “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for COVID” and made clear that would prioritize non-white New Yorkers.
“Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19,” the guidance read.
The racial hierarchy policy for potentially life-saving treatment sparked multiple lawsuits against Bassett, as well as blunt criticism from New York politicians like Assemblyman Jarett Gandolfo (R.), who described Bassett’s memo as “inhumane,” “un-American,” and “despicable.”
She did not retreat from that policy during her time in public office, eventually declaring racism “a public health crisis.”
Bassett, who according to Harvard has “more than 30 years of experience devoted to promoting health equity and social justice,” spent 17 years at the University of Zimbabwe during the reign of socialist dictator Robert Mugabe.
“When I moved to Harare in 1985, social justice was at the core of Zimbabwe’s national health policy,” Bassett gushed in a November 2015 TED Talk. “The new government emerged from a long war of independence and immediately proclaimed a socialist agenda—health care, services, primary education became essentially free. I felt tremendously privileged to be part of this transformation, a revolution. The excitement, the camaraderie was palpable.”
That revolution pursued an explicitly anti-white agenda, famously confiscating land owned by the country’s white minority and redistributing it to Mugabe’s cronies. Famine and economic collapse soon followed in a country that had once been known as the “breadbasket of Africa.”
Bassett blamed the AIDS crisis in the country on “a culture of male superiority” and “colonialism” as she noted that “whites were largely unscathed.”
Joining Daskalakis and Bassett on Mamdani’s Committee on Health is former New York City health commissioner Oxiris Barbot, who resigned from her job in August 2020 after turning down an NYPD request for protective masks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops,” she said at the time.
Barbot went on to criticize then-mayor Bill de Blasio’s (D.) decision to stop housing the city’s homeless in luxury hotels during the pandemic and attack him on the grounds that he did not close schools early enough. The move to remote learning contributed to significant educational problems among students, with the United States’s poor being hit hardest.
Barbot is now president of the United Hospital Fund of New York, where she makes $600,000 a year, tax forms show.
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