Public Employee Press

Bloomberg axe hits health care - again
Clinic closings mean no shots for students

DC 37, community groups, City Comptroller John Liu and other concerned political leaders put up a valiant fight to protect the city clinics that offer free and low-cost vaccines to thousands of residents in low-income neighborhoods. But the Bloomberg administration ignored family needs as the Health Dept. shuttered the Tremont, Bronx, and Corona, Queens, facilities in late August, sparing only the site in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, which will be open only four hours a day.

DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts called the action "a threat to public health and safety" as union and health care activists and elected officials blasted the closings Aug. 7 from the steps of City Hall and later at the Corona site.

Liu, who is backed by DC 37 in his campaign for mayor, illustrated the importance of the clinics to poor and immigrant families by pointing out that he got his own childhood vaccinations at the Corona clinic.

"Preventing disease, an essential part of the public health mission, is being abandoned," said Judith Arroyo, president of Local 436, the United Federation of Nurses and Epidemiologists.

"The city wants to get rid of the public in public health care," said Fitz Reid, president of Health Services Employees Local 768. The Corona and Tremont clinics together immunized 29,000 people in 2012, including 10,000 children. Without the required vaccinations, children cannot attend New York City public schools.

The union organized leafleting at the Tremont facility and another news conference at the Corona site and launched a citywide petition drive against the closings with the Commission on the Public's Health System, the People's Budget Coalition and Make the Road NY.

Without the city clinics, families with two or three children requiring more than one vaccine would face daunting costs, said Susan Frederick, a Public Health Advisor II from the Tremont clinic. She and other members of Local 768 are to be transferred to other agencies.

Queens and Bronx families will have to bear the added expense of traveling to the Fort Greene clinic, which experts say cannot handle the citywide demand. State Sen. José Peralta and City Council members Julissa Ferreras and Letitia James, who has been endorsed by DC 37 for Public Advocate, denounced the closings. "To spring this on parents at the 11th hour before school opens is unfair," said James.