By Sadie Brown

City Council leaders said Thursday that it would lead the charge on promoting vaccines and public health in New York in an era when the federal government has effectively withdrawn from that effort.

Speaker Julie Menin, Committee on Health Chair Lynn Schulman, Committee on Education Chair Eric Dinowitz and Committee on Oversight & Investigations Chair Shekar Krishnan promised that the council was poised to vote to adopt a package of bills they say will combat misinformation and disinformation about vaccines. 

“ When the federal government is deregulating, it is up to cities to take the lead,” Menin told reporters Thursday outside the Tweed Courthouse in Manhattan. She pointed the finger of blame at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a notorious vaccine skeptic, who has directed the agency to roll back recommendations for childhood vaccinations.

“The very person who’s supposed to be in charge of public health is actually the perpetrator of a lot of this misinformation,” the speaker added. “So today, we are taking the lead, the New York City Council is taking the lead and sharing facts of that fiction.”

Council leaders are particularly concerned about the rise of preventable, communicable diseases like measles, which have seen steep increases in states like South Carolina, Utah, Texas, Florida, and Arizona in recent months. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has tracked over 1,800 cases of measles in 2026 so far this year. Four of those cases have been in New York City.

“ As the numbers show, the consequences of spreading lies about the life-saving impact of vaccines can be deadly,” Menin said. “The erosion of public trust in science doesn’t just increase health risk for its own band of followers. It also puts our wider community in jeopardy.”

The bills proposed multiple avenues to distribute reliable and accurate information on vaccines: through the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, the Department of Education and NYC Public Schools, social media campaigns and medical and community centers around the city.

Schulman also proposed ramping up access to vaccines for New Yorkers by authorizing more professionals, including dentists, to administer them and requiring insurance companies to cover vaccination costs.

“If it were up to the federal government, we’d all be sick, we’d all be unhealthy, and some people would die as a result of that,” Schulman said. “Vaccines are the best way to make sure that people are healthy.”

CDC data shows that kindergarten vaccination rates have continued to decline since the COVID-19 pandemic, with 16 states falling below 90% MMR vaccine coverage of kindergarteners in the 2024-2025 school year compared with just 3 states in the 2019-2020 school year. New York’s MMR Kindergarten vaccination rate for 2024-2025 is 97.8%

amNewYork asked council members how they planned to reach New Yorkers who may be skeptical or hesitant to have their children vaccinated, especially those who are enrolled in private, parochial, religious or charter schools.

Dinowitz emphasized one bill in the package, which he sponsored, that would identify the city’s ZIP codes with the lowest vaccination rates and create targeted messaging about the importance of vaccines for public health and safety.

“Not every child is in a public school, but every child does need to be healthy,” Dinowitz said.

Link to story: https://www.amny.com/lifestyle/city-council-bills-vaccines-nyc-rfk-jr/