Talk:New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Controveries

How long before Oxiris Barbot is mentioned for telling New Yorkers to attend crowds in chinatown because the spread of covid-19 was "misinformation" and "racist"? https://twitter.com/NYCHealthCommr/status/1226508570646269954 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1011:B001:F7CE:3D91:A588:E28B:FD29 (talk) 19:39, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia has policies and guidelines. Anyone can add anything they want provided it meets those policies, particularly WP:RS.

Every public health department is controversial, because (if they're doing their job) they're telling people to do things that some people don't want to do. The NYC DOH has a long history of making controversial decisions. For example, during the AIDS epidemic, Commissioner Stephen Joseph shut down the gay bath houses because he identified them as a main source of the disease, and Commissioner Margaret Hamburg allowed needle exchange programs.

If you're writing about controversies involving the NYC DOH and the orthodox Jewish community, Kaporos is the least of it (by the standard of WP:RS. Much more important (since they involve deaths) is the refusal to vaccinate, which recently led to a measles epidemic, and a particular circumcision practice which spread herpesvirus and led to infant deaths and severe neurological damage. This has all been reported in WP:RS such as the New York Times and The Forward. The whole section on Kapros is much too long, given the other controversies.

Oxiris Barbot, and the NYC DOH's work in handling the covid-19 epidemic, is a major complicated topic that could fill its own article, so it would have to be condensed significantly to fit in here. It's hard to tell which policies the Commissioner and DOH are responsible for, and which policies the Mayor is responsible for. The New Yorker had a much-cited article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/04/seattles-leaders-let-scientists-take-the-lead-new-yorks-did-not which discussed the failings of the NYC and NYS department of health in their response to the covid-19 epidemic, although in February it wasn't clear how dangerous the epidemic was. De Blasio has been widely criticized in WP:RS for moving the responsibility for contact tracing from the DOH (which has been doing contact tracing for 200 years) to the (formerly named) Health and Hospital Services, which hired untrained workers and has been unable to start a successful program.

I'm surprised that something as important as the NYC DOH has gotten so little attention in Wikipedia. The NYC DOH itself has published histories of itself and descriptions of its work, which are usually pretty good; even they would deal with controversies better than this WP article. The trouble with writing about the NYC DOH is that there's so much information, it would take you the rest of your life to read it, so the question is where to start. I think the easiest would be to search the New York Times and try to find a long article that gives a good historical background. The New Yorker article might be a good start. There must be a good overview somewhere. --Nbauman (talk) 16:49, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed

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Removed controversies section

I removed the controversies section about 2017 animal rights protests about chickens and a Jewish holiday since it was mostly sourced with unreliable sources. What would be remaining is UNDUE. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid. Grorp (talk) 07:38, 31 October 2022 (UTC)