46 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
Howser’ rubber stamp another decision
that has less to do with science and ev-
erything to do with politics.”) Zucker
got similar flak when he concluded, five
years ago, that fracking was a public-
health threat, a finding that led Cuomo
to ban it.
“I don’t think most people realize the
role that ‘public health’ plays in their lives,”
Zucker said. “The public has such a neg-
ative feeling generally about government.”
E
arly in the summer, Zucker and
some of the medical staff of the state
and county health departments spent a
day checking in on a few summer camps
in Sullivan County, a rural area on the
southwest flank of the Catskills—the
old Borscht Belt. The children come
mostly from Brooklyn and counties closer
to New York City. The Sullivan County
health department had issued a rule re-
quiring every child to have proof of im-
munity before being allowed on the
grounds of a camp. Zucker and his team
wanted to check in on the camps’ com-
pliance and to field questions and con-
cerns. Zucker drove up from Riverdale,
where he lives in an apartment with his
wife and two kids. (He also has an apart-
ment in Albany, where he spends a good
deal of the week.) He had a brand-new
red Volvo wagon, which he, a longtime
car nut, considered a regrettable conces-
sion to fatherhood. He’d brought scones
for the ride. He feigned nonchalance as
we christened the interior with crumbs.
The state health department’s office
in Sullivan County is in back of a small,
rundown office park in the town of Mon-
ticello. The state had loaned the county
some staff, as measles reinforcements,
since Sullivan’s health budget was lean.
Zucker was greeted in the parking lot
by an associate commissioner, Celeste
Johnson: “Welcome to paradise.”
He was led into a small office for a
briefing with a half-dozen staffers. El-
eanor Adams, a state epidemiologist,
said, “Howard and I go back to Ebola.”
They were monitoring several possi-
ble new measles cases: young children,
and a mother with a sick child who had
been turned away from her job working
at a summer camp, and whose where-
abouts were now unknown. Health offi-
cials were afraid that she might be stay-
ing in a so-called bungalow colony, where
families live in close proximity. The
camps, being licensed, have to abide by
state vaccination regulations. “You can
make sure the camps, the schools, the
hospitals, and the clinics are compliant,
but what can you do to the bungalows
if they aren’t?” Zucker said. A couple of
county workers were headed out to camps
that had a history of poorer record-keep-
ing. They would also be looking in on
some camps for children with cancer,
where extra care had to be taken, be-
cause of the kids’ lowered immunity and
likely intolerance of vaccines.
We caravanned over to Camp Bnos,
in the nearby town of Liberty. Almost a
thousand girls were scheduled to arrive
the next day; they’d all be checked for
measles, though not until after the so-
called pump speech—the welcome woo-
hoo. At the entrance, just off the road
and past a gap in the fencing, a guard
had each visitor sign in, a new protocol
instituted by the state, to keep track of
comings and goings for the purpose of
potential contact investigations. Some-
one said, “Can you imagine this on vis-
iting day?” Apparently, authorities were
deciding whether to insist that visitors
be immunized, too. But how? This was
almost nothing—just a hassle with a few
clipboards while a couple of cars were
backed up into the road—but it gave a
hint of how even such minor impositions
might begin to seem invasive, and how
precarious the camps’ continued coöper-
ation might be. “You don’t want to drive
people underground,” Zucker said.
We were met by the heads of the
camp—men in either dark suits or rekel
and a black hat; women in mostly black,
with long sleeves and skirts—who led
us into a dining hall, where a table, set
for sixteen, offered a layout of kosher
sushi, sculpted fruit, rugelach, Ritz crack-
ers, and orange juice.
An administrator said that, of hun-
dreds of families, only two were part
of the anti-vax movement; their chil-
dren weren’t coming to the camp this
year. “Once all the schools are compli-
ant, it will make our lives easier,” Shi-
mon Newmark, a camp director, said.
“No more religious exemption should
help, too. Our staff has basically turned
into a medical office. It’s a lot of work.”
A month before, the staff had started
cancelling registrations of noncompli-
ant families. “One person tried to claim
a religious exemption, then, when that
was no longer accepted, they tried an
allergic exemption,” Newmark said.
“Our M.D. found that allergies have
no relation to vaccines. Eventually, that
family cancelled and got a refund.”
“Let’s ask for directions.”
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