Firsthand Media

An Open Letter to Councilman Lincoln Restler

Date: November 20, 2024
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody and Diane Pagen
Signed by: Over 250 New York City workers
Asks for: “[W]e respectfully ask that you please help City workers, members of the military and all other citizens who were unlawfully forced out and fired as a result of the vaccine mandate.”
Response: Aura Moody received this response on November 26, 2024:

Action taken: President Trump signed Executive Order 14184 reinstating service members discharged under the military's COVID-19 vaccination mandate on January 27, 2025. No action has been taken with regard to New York City workers.

An Open Letter to Councilman Lincoln Restler

Date: November 23, 2024
Written and published by:

Joshua Stylman

Dear Councilmember Restler…

2 years ago · 33 likes · 9 comments · Joshua Stylman

Asks for: A public conversation with Councilman Restler about reinstatement and the mandates, which Restler supported.
Response: None reported.

Congressional Letter to NYC Public Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos

Congressional Letter on Problem Codes December 2 2024

197KB ∙ PDF file

Date: December 2, 2024
Where it has been published: in a press release by Congressman Nick Langworthy and on X
Written by: Congressman Nick Langworthy
Signed by: U.S. Representatives Nick Langworthy, Nick LaLota, Michael Lawler, Claudia Tenney, Anthony D’Esposito, and Andrew Garbarino
Asks for: Calls for the chancellor to answer eight questions about the Department of Education’s use of problem codes in the personnel files of unvaccinated workers. The letter is a follow-up to a similar letter Langworthy sent to the previous chancellor, David Banks, in June 2023. That first letter did not receive a response.
Response: None reported.

Letter from Workers for Choice to New York City Council

Letter to NYC Council from NYC Workers for Choice December 18 2024

284KB ∙ PDF file

Date: December 18, 2024
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody and Diane Pagen
Signed by: Over 280 New York City workers
Asks for: “[W]e respectfully demand that the New York State Legislature and New York City Council help us return to work.” Asks for Resolution 5 and state legislation to be passed to reinstate workers, and for appeals against successful worker lawsuits to be dropped.
Response: Members of the City Council’s Common Sense Caucus have backed reinstatement, with some actively working to achieve it. No response has been received from other Council members.

Letter from Workers for Choice to New York State Legislators

Letter to NYS Legislators from New York Workers for Choice December 30 2024

343KB ∙ PDF file

Date: December 30, 2024
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody and Diane Pagen
Signed by: Over 300 New York City workers
Asks for: “[W]e are asking you to co-sponsor the LET US WORK Bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Jaime Williams.” The bill would reinstate New York City workers who lost jobs under the mandates.
Responses: None

Letter from Workers for Choice to U.S. Congress Members

Letter to US Congress from New York Workers for Choice January 16 2025

480KB ∙ PDF file

Date: January 16, 2025
Written by: Aura Moody and Diane Pagen
Signed by: Over 300 New York City workers
Asks for: “[W]e respectfully demand that the United States Congress help us to get reinstated. . . . Congress should consider using the power of the purse to ensure that the State and City of New York comply with the law, if deemed necessary. We also ask for Congressional hearings, where the perpetrators of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, in both public and private sectors, have to explain their motives and actions and be held accountable . . .”
Response: Aura Moody received acknowledgments via email from the offices of four members of the House.

Diane Pagen talks about the letter after delivering it to Congressional offices in an interview in this report:

Letter from Workers for Choice to U.S. House Oversight Committee Members

Letter to House Oversight Committee February 11 2025

271KB ∙ PDF file

Date: February 11, 2025
Written by: Aura Moody and Diane Pagen
Signed by: Over 300 New York City workers
Asks for: “We are seeking the commensurate reinstatement and compensation that was afforded to the similarly-situated United States military members by President Donald Trump via Executive Order on January 27, 2025.”
Response: None reported.

Letter from Workers for Choice to President Trump

Letter to President Donald Trump from New York Workers for Choice February 21 2025

398KB ∙ PDF file

Date: February 21, 2025
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody and Diane Pagen
Signed by: Over 400 New York City workers
Asks for: “You should consider using the power of the purse to help the unvaccinated workers get reinstated and the businesses restored, the same way you have ordered states to stop COVID-19 vaccine mandates, DEI, transgenderism and congestion pricing, among other Executive Orders. . . . We are looking forward to your intervention on our urgent appeal . . .”
Response: No response reported.

Letter from Workers for Choice to New York Governor Kathy Hochul

Open Letter to Governor Kathy Hochul from New York Workers for Choice March 7 2025

541KB ∙ PDF file

Date: March 7, 2025
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody and Diane Pagen
Signed by: Over 450 New York workers
Asks for: “NYC and NYS workers are rightfully stunned this week by your maudlin reception for fired federal workers, your rush to meet with them and your offer to hire all of them. We seek an explanation from you as to why those workers are worthy of your time and attention while those abused, defamed and fired in your own state are not.”
Response:
- Auto-reply acknowledging receipt when sent to the governor’s email.
- Assistant Attorney General Donya Fernandez acknowledged receipt of the letter by the Labor Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s Office, and requested some additional information.
- Labor Bureau Chief Karen Cacace replied to the letter, saying in an April 15 email to Aura Moody that “the New York State Office of the Attorney General has represented New York State concerning the issues you raised in your complaint. As a result, our office is unable to investigate the issues you have raised.”
- Aura Moody replied: “Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the NYS Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), please provide us with a copy of the reports/findings showing that the New York State Office of the Attorney General represented New York State concerning the issues we raised in our complaint.”
- Labor Bureau Chief Karen Cacace replied on April 23 that the bureau’s FOIL office is processing the request.
- On May 22, Aura Moody received a FOIL response containing court documents for a lawsuit (Dr. A et al. v. Hochul et al.) filed in 2021 by a group of physicians against the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers. New York State Attorney General Letitia James was a defendant in that case, and the attorney general’s office represented her. Health care workers who were subject to the state mandate were among the workers who signed the letter to Kathy Hochul.
Press coverage:
- City workers fired over vax blast state effort to hire federal workers (The Chief)
Submitted to: This letter was submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on June 12, 2025, with the following requests:
- Dear members of the House Oversight Committee:
  Today, June 12, 2025, the governors of sanctuary states and cities are scheduled to testify before you about their policies and spending on illegal immigration, among other issues. As American citizens who have been impacted by the sanctuary policies, we implore the House Oversight Committee to ask New York Governor Kathy Hochul about the impact of her sanctuary state policies in regards to the tens of thousands of New York workers and business owners for declining to submit to an unconstitutional COVID-19 vaccine mandate that was never voted on by any legislative body nor approved by the union membership via the appropriate collective bargaining process.
  It is of paramount importance to highlight that while unvaccinated New Yorkers continue to struggle to make a living and pay their bills, New York politicians such as former Governor Andrew Cuomo, Governor Kathy Hochul, former Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mayor Eric Adams have allocated billions of the taxpayers' money to support illegal aliens, including COVID-19 funds.
  Attached please find the Open Letter sent to Governor Kathy Hochul by New York Workers for Choice on March 7, 2025, to wit, we have not received a response. We are looking forward to hearing that the firings and displacements of tens of thousands of New Yorkers are addressed during your hearing.
  Sincerely,
  Aura Moody, on behalf of New York Workers for Choice
- Dear Members of the Oversight Committee,
  I am a NYer who was unlawfully terminated and publicly insulted by the Governor of my state for declining the Covid shot. Gov Hochul ran a campaign of terrorizing valuable NY workers into taking this shot, and those of us who did not comply had our careers ended by this reckless woman who you will be questioning under oath. Please ask her about her mass firings (which the Mayor of NYC conspired with her on). They wiped out income and savings of tens of thousands of workers and coerced the rest into taking the shot under threat of financial ruin. They also conspired to issue blanket denials so that no one they fired could get Unemployment. It is scandalous.
  We the unvaccinated workers of NYS are all still struggling.
  Diane Pagen, LMSW
  Brooklyn

Letter from New York Educators and Other Workers to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, NYC Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos, and UFT President Michael Mulgrew

Open Letter to Mayor Adams Chancellor Aviles-Ramos and Michael Mulgrew from New York Educators and Workers April 14 2025

705KB ∙ PDF file

Date: April 14, 2025
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody and Diane Pagen
Signed by: Over 500 New York educators and other workers
Asks for: “We need to bring every qualified professional back to work in our city immediately . . . Both public and private sector employees across New York state continue to demand to be reinstated.”
Response: No response reported.

Letter from New York Workers for Choice to United States Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon

Open Letter to AAG Harmeet Dhillon from New York Workers for Choice May 2 2025

441KB ∙ PDF file

Date: May 2, 2025
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody, Diane Pagen, and Michael Kane
Signed by: Over 510 New York workers
Asks for: “Given that our attempts to seek administrative remedy have been unsuccessful, we respectfully ask that the Trump administration and the United States Department of Justice intervene by investigating what really happened in New York that led to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate and its impact on the civil and labor rights of so many people. We hope that the results of such an investigation would lead to the reinstatement of all unlawfully terminated or displaced workers and business owners.”
Response: No response reported.
Press coverage:
- 500 unvaxxed New York workers urge Trump admin to investigate their firings (LifeSiteNews)
- Over 500 Terminated Workers Urge DOJ Civil Rights Probe into New York Vaccine Mandates (DailyClout)

Follow-Up Letter from New York Workers for Choice to New York State Legislature

Follow-Up Letter from New York Workers for Choice to New York State Legislature May 13 2025

1.1MB ∙ PDF file

Date: May 13, 2025
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody, Diane Pagen, and Michael Kane
Signed by: Over 635 New York workers
Asks for: “This is a follow-up to the letter New York Workers for Choice sent to ALL MEMBERS of the New York State Legislature on December 30, 2024, to wit, we have not received a response. In our letter, we asked that you help with the reinstatement of thousands of unlawfully terminated or displaced New York workers who were forced out of their careers and businesses under the pretext of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates . . . We expect an official response to this letter.”
Response: No response reported.

Letter from New York Workers for Choice to Senator Bernie Moreno

Open Letter to U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno from New York Workers for Choice July 31 2025

1.23MB ∙ PDF file

Date: July 31, 2025
Written by: Aura Moody, Diane Pagen, and Michael Kane
This letter was preceded by a similar July 23, 2025 letter from Children’s Health Defense written by Michael Kane and Mary Holland to Senator Moreno.
Signed by: Over 635 New York workers
Asks for: “[W]e are appealing to you for intervention in convening Senate hearings focused on fired or displaced unvaccinated workers and business owners. Justice for the unvaccinated has not been served, and relief is warranted.”
Response: No response reported.

Letter from New York Workers for Choice to the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee

Open Letter from New York Workers for Choice to the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee July 13 2026

654KB ∙ PDF file

Date: July 13, 2026
Written by: Aura Moody, Diane Pagen, and Stella Mitchell-Porto
Signed by: Over 500 New York City workers
Message: The letter commends the Committee for launching an investigation into American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten’s alleged use of member dues to fund production of her 2025 book Why Fascists Fear Teachers, and states that the AFT did not use funds to provide due process and proper representation to members suspended and fired under COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The signatories offer to support the Committee’s investigation: “[W]e stand ready to provide evidence in the form of oral testimonies, videos and written documents that may assist you in uncovering how union dues have been misused for projects unrelated to the members they have a duty to represent.”
Response: No response reported.

Letter from New York Workers for Choice to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani

Open Letter from New York Workers for Choice to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani July 27 2026

366KB ∙ PDF file

Date: July 27, 2026
Where it has been published: On the Teachers for Choice Substack
Written by: Aura Moody, Diane Pagen, and Stella Mitchell-Porto
Signed by: Over 500 New York City workers
CC’d: New York City Council, NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services, NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, New York State Legislature, New York State Civil Service Commission, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, New York Teachers for Choice, Bravest for Choice, Educators for Freedom, Cops 4 Freedom, The Finest Unfiltered, Medical Professionals for Informed Consent, Court Workers for Choice
Asks for: “The vaccine mandates were implemented without being voted on by any legislative body, nor were they ratified through the proper collective bargaining processes. Unvaccinated workers were completely denied basic constitutional and labor rights, as well as proper union representation. Many workers were coerced into early retirement with severe financial penalties, were forced to waive labor rights, resigned, returned to work without back pay, lost seniority, were denied unemployment insurance, and were forced to take the COVID-19 shot under duress, resulting in immense emotional and financial distress. . . .
“[W]e respectfully request a formal meeting with you and your administration to discuss concrete pathways to rectify these human and civil rights violations.”
Responses:
- New York State Assembly Minority Leader Ed Ra responded on August 6, 2026 with the following message: “Thank you for reaching out to my office and forwarding your letter to Mayor Mamdani. I fully support the reinstatement of public employees who were terminated for choosing not to take the COVID-19 shot.”
- The NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection responded on August 7, 2026 with the following message: “Thank you for contacting the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP). Unfortunately, we cannot provide legal advice on the issue you described, and we do not enforce worker protection laws in that area.”

Letter from New York Workers for Choice to New York Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Leaders

Open Letter from New York Workers for Choice to New York Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Leaders August 13 2026

340KB ∙ PDF file

Date: August 13, 2026
Written by: Aura Moody, Diane Pagen, and Stella Mitchell-Porto
Signed by: Over 500 New York City workers
Sent to:
- The Office of the Governor of New York State
  The Office of the Mayor of New York City
  Members of the New York State Legislature
  Members of the New York City Council
  The Office of the Attorney General of New York State
  The Office of the New York State Comptroller
  The Office of the New York City Comptroller
  The Office of the New York City Public Advocate
Asks for: “Formal Inquiry Regarding Public Funding Priorities, COVID-19 Mandate Enforcement, and Equal Treatment for New York State and Municipal Workers”
Follow-up: New York Workers for Choice sent a follow-up letter requesting a response on August 24, 2026:

Follow-up Email to Members of the New York Legislature and Executive Leadership August 24 2026

55.7KB ∙ PDF file

Mamdani Betrays Inaugural Promise in Failure of Public Accountability

Aimee — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:39:16 GMT

“I promise you this: If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you.” —Zohran Mamdani, inaugural address, January 1, 2026

The buses may not be free yet, but talk is still cheap.

Now approaching eight months into his tenure as New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani has frequently insisted that he wants to be a mayor for all New Yorkers, but when it comes to those who lost City jobs under the 2021 COVID-19 vaccine mandates, his unspoken message has been “I didn’t mean you.”

The day after Mamdani was elected, outgoing mayor Eric Adams made a surprise announcement: Things had changed, he said. It was time for the fired workers to come back, without having to sign away their rights in legal waivers, as reinstatements had required in the past. They would have a “right to return” to their old job titles and salaries.

The Adams administration got the ball rolling by proposing a personnel rule change required for some of the workers to come back. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) held a virtual hearing about it on November 19. More than 244 people attended, and many workers testified.

Union leaders representing FDNY firefighters and EMS workers called in to back their reinstatement. Phyllis Inserillo, chief of staff for City Councilwoman Joann Ariola, showed up to say the City should take it further and bring back workers who had been forced to resign and retire early.

The hearing was meant to be a prelude to sending the proposed rule amendment to the state Civil Service Commission in Albany for approval, a step required by state and city rules, along with the approval of the DCAS commissioner and the mayor.

That step was never taken. Mamdani took office, and Adams DCAS commissioner Louis Molina was replaced by Yume Kitasei. The workers, who had been instructed to email their former agencies to request reinstatement by December 5, waited. And waited.

One large group of former workers didn’t need the rule change to be reinstated. Teachers and other former Department of Education (DOE) employees fell under different employment rules and could in theory be reinstated under the Adams offer right away. They too sent their emails by December 5 and waited. DOE acknowledged receipt of the emails. Then nothing.

On January 12, Oren Barzilay, then president of the union representing FDNY EMS workers and fire inspectors, took City Hall to task for letting the reinstatement process languish, urging the Mamdani administration to prioritize it.

At a January 15 press conference, a journalist from Cafecito Break asked Samuel Levine, Mamdani’s new Department of Consumer and Worker Protection commissioner, if he would be addressing the workers who wanted their jobs back. “We are going to work throughout the year during my tenure, and I know the Mayor’s tenure, to make New York the most worker-friendly city in the United States,” he declared, sidestepping the actual question.

On January 19, I asked the mayor himself about the reinstatement offer at a press conference in the Bronx. Would he expedite sending the rule change to Albany? Would he expedite the reinstatement process? Would his administration let workers who had met the December 5 deadline to request reinstatements know when they would move forward? “I appreciate you flagging this issue,” he responded, as if it was the first he was hearing about it. “This is something that we’ll follow up on.”

He didn’t. Mayor Mamdani did not follow up, did not send the rule change to the Civil Service Commission, did not advance the reinstatement process, and did not give the New Yorkers who were waiting an ETA. He did not communicate with the former teachers and firefighters and EMTs who were waiting tables and painting houses to make ends meet, wondering if the City might actually give them back the careers it had cut short because they wouldn’t take the shot.

Mamdani did not follow up, and his administration did not reply to subsequent inquiries from Firsthand Media about the status of the rule change and the reinstatement process. Councilwoman Ariola’s office responded, though, when I asked if they knew anything about the status of the reinstatement process. Ariola herself had brought it up with Mamdani during a December call, they told me, before he even took office. Apparently he and his administration knew all about it when questioned in January. They were just giving any press who asked about it the brush-off.

Months passed. Nothing happened. I checked in periodically with DCAS and the Civil Service Commission to see if there was any movement on the rule change, and always got the same reply: No update at this time.

Then last week, a bunch of firefighters and EMS workers who had been terminated by FDNY finally got an email response from the department:

The proposed rule hadn’t been withdrawn, but FDNY was effectively declaring the Adams reinstatement offer dead. I can only speculate as to why, since the department spokesperson wouldn’t explain it to me. Either FDNY has been told the rule change will never happen or they just read the writing on the wall and decided to get real with their former employees and let them move on.

Here’s what the writing on the wall says:

If one year after the date of the public hearing held to consider approval of a change of a rule of the commissioner of citywide administrative services (as provided for by section 20 of the New York State civil service law) either the commissioner of citywide administrative services or the mayor of the City of New York or the state civil service commission has not acted upon the matter, the resolution shall automatically be deemed withdrawn . . .

That’s from the personnel rules DCAS was following when they held the November 19 hearing. It means the proposed rule change will automatically expire in a few months. It can take that long for the Civil Service Commission to get through the approval process once they’ve received a proposed rule amendment from DCAS. DCAS itself is no longer even responding to my inquiries about the rule change with a “no update” message. Now I just get good old-fashioned stonewalling when I ask for a status update.

Undaunted, the affected workers have made their own effort to communicate with the mayor about the reinstatement offer. On July 27, they sent this open letter to Mayor Mamdani, requesting a meeting:

Open Letter from New York Workers for Choice to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani July 27 2026

366KB ∙ PDF file

They tell me he hasn’t written back yet.

It would appear that the Mamdani administration is just running out the clock on the proposed personnel rule change so that after November 19 the Adams reinstatement offer will be invalid for all of the workers who required it. For those that didn’t, the former DOE employees, there is simply no path to reinstatement.

They no longer have access to the department’s internal job market, and the vacancies they left have long since been filled. The DOE would need to actively find positions where they could be reinstated to their previous job titles and salary levels to follow through on the Adams offer. They’re not doing that, and like the mayor and DCAS, they’re not talking about it either.

It looks a lot like Mayor Mamdani and his administration have decided to just hide from any pesky questions about reinstatement from reporters and New Yorkers who were promised a “right to return” to work, until the proposed rule change expires and the issue goes away. It probably seems pretty easy to sweep under the rug. After all, none of the dozen or so major news outlets that covered the Adams announcement in 2025 have followed up in 2026 to report on how things turned out.

Of course, that’s just how things appear. As a reporter, I don’t want to make claims I don’t have evidence for, and I have no evidence since my inquiries go unanswered. All I know is that whatever is going on behind the scenes, the result is a failure of public accountability and government transparency.

But it’s possible the mayor has just been tied up with other business and will rectify the situation before time runs out. He is obviously a busy man, weighing in on international law, developing new grocery stores, and putting out documentaries. It’s possible there just hasn’t been room on the mayor’s calendar to follow through on a promise made by the mayor of the City of New York to a group of New Yorkers who spent years of their lives serving the city. Maybe he’ll find an opening soon.

In the meantime, advocates for those New Yorkers have things to say:

Oren Barzilay retired recently as union president, but after hearing about the FDNY email, he commented on the City’s inaction on the reinstatement offer:

The city's refusal to change its position is shameful. They know firsthand that doing so would be an admission of guilt and an acknowledgement of wrongdoing by both the Adams and de Blasio administrations. As time passes, it becomes increasingly clear that this was an abuse of power by our leaders.

The COVID-19 mandate was a massive fraud that caused far more harm than good, allowing some to enrich themselves while no one is held accountable. No one should ever be forced to put something into their body against their will just to keep their livelihood.

Politicians pushed these ridiculous rules to outplay one another, and humanity paid the price. As a result, people lost their dignity, homes, families, and livelihoods, some lost it all, their life.

City Councilwoman Joann Ariola also commented on the Mamdani administration’s failure to proceed with reinstatements and the FDNY email:

Eric Adams repeatedly failed our civil servants, and now Mayor Mamdani is continuing the failure by not moving this issue forward to the state civil service commission. The administration wants to simply pretend that these men and women who are still being impacted by the unjust vaccine mandates don’t exist, and it wants to move forward without them. But these are people who dedicated their careers to this city, and they deserve to be reinstated, not just brushed off and made to feel invisible.
I would like to know if other agencies also received the email informing employees that there “is no mechanism” to return them to work as the FDNY members did, or if those other civil servants are still waiting in limbo.

And Matt Connor from Bravest for Choice, the organization that advocates for FDNY workers adversely affected by the mandate, had this to say:

Last week, at least six former FDNY employees received an email response to their most recent request to be reinstated to their jobs after being terminated for non-compliance to the COVID-19 Vaxx Mandate nearly five years ago. These most recent requests were made by members of Bravest For Choice, reflective of the ongoing opposition to the illegal terminations in question, and of the coordinated effort to reverse the outcome. The requests were submitted more than eight months ago in response to the “Right To Return” policy announced by the defeated and outgoing mayor Eric Adams, whose administration had been fighting tooth and nail in court to obstruct our efforts to reverse the mandate and its fallout. However, Eric Adams never followed through by sending the DCAS Rules and Regulations language to the NYS Civil Service Commission for an approval vote, which would create a return pathway for uniformed members of service, since they have been separated for more than one year. We can only speculate as to why Adams never sent the rule change for a vote: one last knife twist into the backs of “the unvaccinated” on the way out the door, administrative incompetence, PR rebranding as an advocate for labor, an effort to distance himself from the crumbling lies of the COVID era?
Speculation aside, the failure of the Adams administration to follow through on their own policy announcement has left the fate of the DCAS Personnel Rules and Regulations change referral in the hands of our current mayor, Zohran Mamdani. While still on the campaign trail, he was interviewed on the Finest Unfiltered Podcast and told NYPD (ret.) Lt. John Macari that he would not reinstate members terminated under the mandate. The communication received by Bravest For Choice members last week is significant because it is the first indication from the Mamdani administration that it will keep its campaign promise. The author of the email, Stella Xu, the FDNY’s Chief Workforce Strategist, who serves under the Deputy Commissioner of Human Capital, Barbara Dannenberg, apparently sees no irony in dismissing the collective human capital of these members who stood up against an illegal mandate after years of committed service, and remarkably still wish to serve the people of New York City after nearly five years of torment perpetrated by their former employer. The dismissive response feigns empathy, and on its face contradicts the “right to return” that was promised to these members.
The FDNY response, albeit belated, is at least an acknowledgement of the request, which is more than any other city agency has done, and the Office of the Mayor remains silent on the issue, failing to follow through on its promise to circle back. The incoherent position the City of New York on vaxx-mandate reinstatements stands in stark contrast to the progress that has been made at the federal level with the recent efforts by the Dept. of War to acknowledge the mandate as unconstitutional, offering an apology, back-pay, and incentive for those who wish to continue service. Bravest For Choice will continue to advocate for the reinstatement of these members and all former employees of the City of New York terminated for non-compliance. We are seeking parity with the terms of the military reinstatements as we continue to call for a COVID reckoning that is long overdue.

The Firsthand Report ⌗9

Aimee — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 23:31:51 GMT

☞ MORE THAN 500 NEW YORK CITY WORKERS HAVE SENT AN OPEN LETTER TO MAYOR MAMDANI requesting a meeting to discuss reinstating municipal employees who were fired and forced into retirement under the 2021 COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The letter follows an email last week from FDNY to fired workers saying that they would not be reinstated under the plan announced by former mayor Eric Adams because the Mamdani administration had not followed through on a personnel rule change required for reinstatements.

The July 27 letter is the latest in a long-running open letter campaign by New York workers seeking reinstatement and redress for COVID-19 vaccine mandate firings. You can find all of them in this tracker. Jump to the bottom for the letter to Mamdani.

☞ Ready to get carded on social media? New York State Attorney General Letitia James has issued the final rule for the STOP ADDICTIVE FEEDS EXPLOITATION (SAFE) FOR KIDS ACT, WHICH WILL REQUIRE SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES TO VERIFY USERS’ AGES.

Governor Kathy Hochul signed the SAFE Act into law in June 2024, but it’s taken a couple years for the AG’s office to hash out the details of how it will work. The law will prohibit social media companies from providing feeds that are algorithmically personalized to be addictive to people under the age of 18 without parental consent. They will also not be allowed to send notifications to minors between midnight and 6 a.m.

The rules do allow some flexibility in how companies can verify your age. It can be done with a video, a photo, or personal details like an email address or phone number that the company can match to evidence that you’re a grown-up, instead of with a government-issued ID.

In fact, the range of verification options is broad enough that the law might just end up demonstrating that social media companies won’t need to card you at all, because they already know all about you.

Still, the SAFE Act will take anonymous doomscrolling off the table for adults in New York when it goes into effect in January. Here’s a more detailed critique from NetChoice, one the act’s main critics.

☞ RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, and other Health and Human Services OFFICIALS CELEBRATED THE FIRST YEAR OF THE HEALTH TECH ECOSYSTEM rollout, a.k.a. the “kill the clipboard” initiative, on Monday (they mean the one you fill out every time you see a doctor). The initiative led by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is spearheading the shift to fully digital health systems.

After a rundown of first-year accomplishments and some second-year goal setting, the event concluded with a mock funeral for the clipboard. You can watch the whole thing in this video (jump to 1:13:30 for the “funeral”). If you were a fan of The Office, you’ll love the grand finale.

The list of achievements touted at the event included new CMS-approved apps, increased use of the national TEFCA system to share electronic medical records, digital ID verification for Medicare recipients to access their records, and SMART Health Links that let patients share their medical records with a QR code. Amy Gleason also announced the new Office of Health Technology and Products that I reported on last time, which she’s heading.

RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz repeated their usual rhetoric about patients owning their medical records (we don’t), and speakers talked about the importance of patients being able to trust the new health tech. Here’s an idea for Health Tech Ecosystem year 2: Stop glossing over privacy and security concerns with “you own it” fairy tales and get serious about updating HIPAA.

ICYMI, you can see demos of some of the CMS-approved apps at the April Health Tech Ecosystem app launch event in the video below. If you’d like to see how digital ID works to give Medicare recipients access to their medical records, there’s a demo of that an hour in.

☞ SENATORS ARE FAST-TRACKING BRADFORD PENTONY WILSON’S NOMINATION TO RUN THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION (NARA) by including it in Senate Resolution 817, which advances 74 nominations as a group.

As I reported previously, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs gave Wilson’s nomination for Archivist the green light after asking him only four questions, including one about his grandkids.

Federal records management expert Don Lueders published a list of 20 substantive questions for him and the Society of American Archivists put out a list of five, but it’s looking unlikely that he’ll have to answer any of them before starts his new job.

The Firsthand Report ⌗8

Aimee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:19:16 GMT

☞ RIP CAT MCGUIRE. New York anti-mandate protest organizer Cathleen McGuire passed away on June 19 after a battle with brain cancer. Cat was one of the leaders in the New York City protest movement against COVID-19 vaccine mandates. She organized protests with New York Freedom Rally (now New York Freedom Network), which published a remembrance of her on Instagram.

I saw her often at the demonstrations I covered in 2021 and 2022—usually at the front of a march demanding reinstatement for workers who had been fired or suspended for refusing to take a shot (like this one—Cat is in the blue shirt), or somewhere near the mic at a rally, making sure the event went as planned.

I will remember the energy and spirit she brought to those demonstrations, and the dedication she showed to supporting workers who were taking the brunt of the mandate policies. Here’s Cat (jump to about half an hour into the video) in her “I Will Not Comply” shirt, dancing at a rally in support of the Canadian trucker convoy in February 2022:

☞ The rule change required to reinstate NYC municipal workers fired under the COVID-19 vaccine mandate has once again not been considered by the New York State Civil Service Commission this month, and the next commission meeting is scheduled for September.

This week, FDNY firefighters and EMS workers who requested reinstatement by the December 5, 2025 deadline set by former mayor Eric Adams when he made the reinstatement offer received EMAILS FROM THE DEPARTMENT SAYING THAT FDNY COULD NOT REINSTATE THEM due to the lack of rule change.

This is an image of the email they received:

☞ Over 500 current and former New York City workers have sent a letter to the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee to commend them on their investigation into American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten’s alleged use of member dues to fund production of her 2025 book Why Fascists Fear Teachers.

THE LETTER CALLS OUT WEINGARTEN AND THE AFT for failing to use its funds to provide due process and proper representation to members suspended and fired under COVID-19 vaccine mandates, offering to support the Committee’s investigation: “[W]e stand ready to provide evidence in the form of oral testimonies, videos and written documents that may assist you in uncovering how union dues have been misused for projects unrelated to the members they have a duty to represent.”

The July 13 letter is the latest in a long-running open letter campaign by New York workers seeking reinstatement and redress for COVID-19 vaccine mandate firings. You can find all of them in this tracker. Jump to the bottom for the letter to the Committee.

☞ The COVID-19 VACCINE MANDATE FOR NEW YORK STATE MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY STAFF IS BEING OFFICIALLY REPEALED. Yes, that’s right—it’s still on the books in 2026. However, it hasn’t been enforced since July 2023, when the Office of Mental Health officially stopped citing employees for failing to comply.

The repeal will go into effect later this year after a 60-day public comment period. The state Register rule change announcement notes that the Office of Mental Health “does not anticipate that any person will object.”

☞ The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which have been spearheading HHS’s acceleration of the health IT and AI rollout, have quietly OPENED A NEW OFFICE OF HEALTH TECHNOLOGY AND PRODUCTS (OHTP). The office was announced in June in the Federal Register and was picked up by healthcare industry trade press, but CMS and HHS did not issue press releases or make a public announcement.

You can get an extensive rundown of what OHTP will be doing in the Federal Register announcement. OHTP is being headed by Amy Gleason, who has had a leading role in CMS health IT efforts under the Trump administration.

☞ It looks like UPDATES TO THE HIPAA PRIVACY RULE will actually get off the ground in August. They’re on the federal government calendar of regulatory changes for that month, although no further details are available right now. A second update seems to be scheduled for November.

The HIPAA Privacy Rule lays out all the details about who can access your medical records and under what circumstances. In 2021, HHS issued proposed amendments to “Support, and Remove Barriers to, Coordinated Care and Individual Engagement,” and those are the ones that should be moving forward in August. According to the schedule, the November update will be proposed amendments to “Promote Individuals' Timely Access to their Protected Health Information.” I’ll be keeping an eye out for details.

Religious Liberty Commission Report Includes NYC Worker's Testimony on COVID-19 Workplace Vaccine Mandates

Aimee — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 23:09:24 GMT

On February 9th of this year, Hermione Susana testified before members of the Religious Liberty Commission (RLC) about losing jobs with three employers as they and the New York City government rolled out a series of COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

She told them about how her requests for a religious accommodation as a Catholic were rejected and ignored, and how the loss of her livelihood led to losing her apartment and having to stay with family out of state while fighting to regain employment.

In the brief time she was given to testify, Susana did a tremendous job of detailing the ordeal that not only she but countless other workers across the public and private sectors in New York City endured after being denied religious accommodations to the workplace vaccine mandates that pushed them out of jobs, careers, and homes.

Hermione Susana testified at the fifth hearing of the Religious Liberty Commission in Washington D.C. and answered questions from commissioners on February 9, 2026.

Yesterday, her story was presented to the President as part of the Religious Liberty Commission’s draft report on the state of religious liberty in the United States.

The Commission was created by an executive order in May 2025, and held seven hearings over the following year where members of the public testified about their experiences with religious discrimination, threats to religious liberty, and the protections they would like to see put in place.

President Donald Trump was presented with the RLC’s draft report in the Oval Office on June 26, 2026.

The draft report also includes testimony from a Catholic New York family, the Costines, whose daughter was barred from attending public school after the state repealed religious exemptions to childhood vaccinations in 2019.

The issue of COVID-19 vaccine mandates for adults receives substantial attention in the report through the testimony of Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who was fired from his position as director of University of California Irvine’s medical ethics program after challenging the university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate in court, as well as the testimonies of U.S. military service members.

President Donald Trump touched on the RLC’s draft report during his remarks at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s 2026 Policy Conference on June 26, 2026.

The draft report includes 12 key recommendations from the RLC, along with numerous detailed recommendations related to the themes of 13 of its chapters.

Some of the recommendations relate directly to Hermione Susana’s testimony:

Support litigation upholding religious freedom in employment. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should support strategic litigation seeking to protect religious freedom rights in employment, including the rights of employees to:
- Participate in an interactive religious accommodation process with employers, resulting in genuine accommodation;
- Be free from retaliation for requesting a religious accommodation or engaging in private religious speech while off-duty.
Provide “Know Your Rights” posters. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should issue a “Know Your Rights” poster that employers may post in employee gathering areas.

Further recommendations related to vaccine mandates include:

Investigate and litigate religious freedom violations. The Department of Health and Human Services’ and Department of Justice’s Offices of Civil Rights, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should open civil rights investigations into—or file strategic litigation against—federally funded educational, medical, and governmental entities that may have violated religious freedom rights by denying religious exemptions to vaccine mandates.
Support litigation upholding religious freedom in relation to vaccines. The Department of Justice should support strategic litigation seeking to protect religious freedom rights in relation to vaccines, particularly the rights of school children to receive religious exemptions from vaccine mandates.
Support legislation upholding religious freedom in relation to vaccines. The Administration should advocate for the passage of federal legislation requiring educational institutions to grant students religious exemptions from vaccination requirements as a condition of receiving federal support.
Issue guidance on religious freedom in relation to vaccines. The Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should issue guidance explaining the scope of the rights of people of faith to receive religious accommodations to vaccine mandates in schools, employment, and healthcare settings.
Send official letters urging respect for religious freedom in relation to vaccines. The Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services should send official letters to federally funded educational, medical, and governmental entities that deny religious exemptions to vaccine mandates while allowing exemptions for non-religious reasons, urging them to protect parental rights and religious freedom by allowing religious exemptions.
Prioritize approval of ethically acceptable alternative vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration should prioritize approving vaccines that offer an ethically acceptable alternative to vaccines that frequently raise religious objections, such as those developed through the use of cell lines derived from aborted fetuses.

You can read the full 224-page draft report on the U.S. Department of Justice website, and a two-page summary is also available. The draft will be open to comments until July 12, and a virtual public meeting will be held after that to review the draft and comments that have been submitted before the report is finalized.

Many New Yorkers sent comments to the RLC during the past year. They are part of the public record and are available in the Public Comments section of the Religious Liberty Commission Resources website page.

If you would like to submit your own comments before July 12, you can find detailed instructions on how to do so at the top of the same page.

Hermione Susana talked with me in 2024 on the New York Mandate Podcast:

New York Mandate Podcast, Ep. 60: Firefighter O'Brian Pastrana & Attorney Sujata Gibson

Aimee — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:11:50 GMT

“I really hope that there’s some accountability held for those who were responsible for pushing forward with all of this. Too many wrongs were done. A lot of them still have not been corrected. People need to be made aware that this was wrong, what happened, and a lot of people have been affected.” - O’Brian Pastrana

In this episode of the New York Mandate Podcast, I talk with retired FDNY firefighter O’Brian Pastrana and attorney Sujata Gibson, shortly after Gibson presented oral arguments in his federal appeal against the New York City Fire Department.

Pastrana was retired from the fire department after he developed heart damage following a COVID-19 vaccination he took in compliance with New York City’s 2021 vaccine mandate for municipal workers.

After the June 22, 2026 hearing at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, I sat down with Pastrana, Gibson, and attorney Christina Martinez. Gibson discussed the importance of the case and where it’s headed, and Pastrana talked with me about the profound changes to his life since 2021, the hearing, and his hopes for the future.

Here are some links related to things we talked about during the episode:

You can listen to the full June 22, 2026 hearing where Sujata Gibson presented oral arguments in Pastrana v. New York City Fire Department on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit website.

Bravest for Choice
This organization advocates for NYC firefighters, fire inspectors, and EMS workers who were adversely affected by New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Attorney Christina Martinez talked with me about the Pastrana case and other lawsuits challenging New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates last year:

About the New York Mandate Podcast

The New York Mandate Podcast is an ongoing series of conversations exploring the costs and consequences of vaccine mandates in New York City. I talk with workers, students, and parents who have been directly affected by the mandates, as well as legal and policy experts.

In late 2021, the City introduced a series of requirements for workers to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. These requirements were put in place through executive orders issued by the administration of former mayor Bill de Blasio. They covered nearly all workers in New York City, in both the public and private sectors. They also barred unvaccinated adults, including parents, from schools.

Mayor Eric Adams kept the mandates in place until November 1, 2022 for the private sector and February 10, 2023 for City workers, and encouraged private employers to put their own vaccine requirements in place.

The views expressed in the New York Mandate podcast are the personal opinions of the people speaking, and are not intended to provide medical or legal advice.

The Firsthand Report ⌗7

Aimee — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:29:29 GMT

☞ ATTORNEY WARNER MENDENHALL passed away on June 8 after a battle with cancer. My deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends. Mendenhall was the founder of Freedom Counsel, an organization that brought together attorneys, scientists, and other experts to fight COVID mandates and other attacks on civil liberties.

He represented a group of New York City firefighters in an effort to bring their lawsuit against New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, Garland v. FDNY, to the U.S. Supreme Court. (His co-counsel Scott Lloyd talked with me about the petition in 2024.) The Court declined to review that case, but Mendenhall leaves a legacy of many years of successful advocacy for individual rights and liberties.

Mendenhall spoke with me at the 2024 Rescue the Republic rally in Washington D.C., where some of the FDNY firefighters and Bravest for Choice members he was representing carried an American flag to open the rally:

☞ The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing yesterday on no fewer than 11 Trump administration nominees. One of them was BRADFORD P. WILSON, NOMINATED TO RUN THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES and Records Administration (NARA). I went into some detail about why the national Archivist is an important position back in March. The short story is that the Archivist manages all federal records, and we need someone with the technical expertise to put our digital record management house in order.

That issue was not raised during the hearing, which opened with Democratic Senator Gary Peters slamming the committee for failing to take standard steps to vet the nominees and allotting little time to question each nominee. Peters accused the committee’s Republican majority of rubber-stamping Trump’s nominees.

It sure looks like that’s what’s happening with Wilson’s nomination. Like the other nominees at the hearing, he was not given the opportunity to give a statement. Wilson was asked all of four questions, one of which was about his grandkids, who were in the audience.

☞ FORMER FDNY FIREFIGHTER O’BRIAN PASTRANA WILL BE BACK IN COURT on June 22, when his attorneys, Christina Martinez and Sujata Gibson, present oral arguments at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Pastrana sued the fire department, the health department, and New York City after being forced to retire in his mid-thirties due to heart damage following a City-mandated COVID-19 vaccination. Pastrana and Gibson talked about the case with Michael Kane’s CHD.TV show earlier this week.

The 2:00 p.m. hearing will be open to the public and Pastrana’s supporters are making plans to attend. The hearing will also be livestreamed on the court’s YouTube channel.

☞ Cyberprivacy advocate Naomi Brockwell and the Ludlow Institute are asking the public to SUPPORT H.R. 8470, THE SURVEILLANCE ACCOUNTABILITY ACT by contacting legislators and asking them to co-sponsor the bill.

The Surveillance Accountability Act, introduced in April by Representatives Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert, reinforces Constitutional protections from search and seizure in the digital realm. It seeks to “ensure that all searches that significantly impinge on the privacy or security of a person require a warrant based on probable cause, to provide a right of action for violations of Fourth Amendment rights, and for other purposes.” Sounds good to me.

☞ Would you like to SUE THE GOVERNMENT AGENCY THAT HAD YOU CENSORED during COVID (or whenever)? If the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression (JAWBONE) Act becomes law, you might be able to. Here’s a little overview of what the JAWBONE Act would do.

This new piece of federal legislation has been co-sponsored by Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. It’s an uncommon bipartisan pairing, but that’s the point: Whether it’s the Biden administration pushing social media companies to censor COVID policy dissent or the Trump administration putting the screws to networks and late-night TV hosts, the government shouldn’t be using its power to pressure media companies into censorship.

If you agree, you can add the JAWBONE Act to your list of bills to ask your legislators to support.

☞ For those of you who are following the NYC MUNICIPAL WORKER REINSTATEMENT SAGA: You will be disappointed but I’m sure unsurprised at this point to hear that the rule change required to reinstate workers fired under the vaccine mandate has once again not been considered by the New York State Civil Service Commission this month. I’m continuing to follow this issue but don’t have any new information on it for now.

MEDIA RADAR

📡 Duty to Disobey will be shown in theaters on June 30, and tickets are available now online. The film distributed by Children’s Health Defense is about the COVID-19 vaccine mandate imposed on U.S. military service members.

While you’re waiting to see the film, check out Robert A. Green Jr.’s book about the military mandate, Defending the Constitution Behind Enemy Lines.

Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY) to Improve Public Transparency with New Website

Aimee — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:48:29 GMT

Last week, I wrote about a lapse in public reporting by the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY). That’s the state health information exchange (HIE) that allows health care and social service providers, as well as public health authorities, to share patient medical records. It’s managed by a nonprofit organization called the New York eHealth Collaborative.

Now I’m pleased to bring you a more positive update from NYeC, which is responsible for publishing the SHIN-NY’s committee meeting minutes and other information:

Not only has the SHIN-NY’s online information been brought up to date, with the addition of agendas and minutes from 20 meetings and current committee member listings, but NYeC will soon be launching a dedicated SHIN-NY website to improve public transparency.

Here’s what NYeC had to say:

Like many organizations, we experienced staffing transitions over the past six to nine months. During the same period of time we have been implementing regulatory changes and new strategic initiatives, while also developing a new website for the SHIN-NY to support much of this new work. Unfortunately, this resulted in an oversight related to website posting of materials. During that period, our priority has been updating our systems and processes to reflect those changes, and we are actively working to catch up on and share current updates from the Statewide Collaboration Process. We also look forward to the new website as a forum that makes additional information available and accessible to the public. As stewards of the statewide collaboration process for the SHIN-NY, we remain committed to public transparency.

I’m very glad to hear this, since as they noted, they’re “implementing regulatory changes and new strategic initiatives” that affect how New Yorkers’ most personal medical records are handled. It’s important for us all to be kept in the loop.

NYeC is also soliciting public feedback on proposed updates to the rules that govern how health care organizations participate in the SHIN-NY. If you’d like to get your health data wonk on, you can sign up for a July 15 webinar on the updates. That will be followed by a 45-day public comment period.

[Updated] The Nonprofit That Manages How New Yorkers’ Medical Records Are Shared Isn't Meeting Public Transparency Requirements

Aimee — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:40:41 GMT

June 12 UPDATE: I’m pleased to report that in response to my inquiries, NYeC updated its website today with recent meeting agendas as well as minutes from 18 SHIN-NY committee meetings. They also added full 2026 committee member listings.

In the state of New York there is a health information exchange (HIE) that allows health care and social service providers to share patient medical records, with patient consent. It’s called the Statewide Health Information Network for New York, the SHIN-NY. The SHIN-NY also allows public health authorities to access information in medical records that has been approved for use in public health activities, without patient consent.

The nonprofit organization designated by the New York State Department of Health to oversee and manage the SHIN-NY is called the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC). It’s NYeC that is in charge of organizing and overseeing the committees that create policies for the SHIN-NY and select patient data to be used for public health activities. NYeC organizes committees, holds meetings, and drafts policies and documents; the state health department approves them.

This partnership between NYeC and the health department is called the Statewide Collaboration Process (SCP). The SCP is required by the regulations that govern the SHIN-NY.

That’s how the system that manages access to all of our most personal health records in the state of New York works, and as the SHIN-NY’s official State-Designated Entity (SDE), NYeC is required to keep the public in the loop—at least to a minimal extent. Here is what the standard operating procedure (SOP) rules that govern the Statewide Collaboration Process have to say about it:

Documentation Requirements

NYeC, in coordination with each SCP committee, is responsible for the public disclosure of committee meeting agendas, meeting minutes, white papers, and recommendations.⁴ NYeC, in coordination with each SCP committee Chair, shall ensure these documentation and disclosure requirements are met in a timely fashion (i.e., as soon as practicable prior to or after each meeting).

All documentation associated with SCP committee or entity work shall be made available on NYeC’s website (www.nyehealth.org).

SHIN-NY standing and ad hoc work teams may, but are not required to, make their work products available on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of NYeC and the Department. In these cases, such documentation will be made available on NYeC’s website (www.nyehealth.org).

⁴N.Y. Comp. Codes R. & Regs. Tit. 10 § 300.3 - Statewide collaboration process and SHIN-NY policy guidance

Now take a look at NYeC’s website as of today:

Screenshot of the NYeC website on June 11, 2026

The last meeting minutes (called “Notes” on the website) published are from October 2025. The last agenda is from March 2026. The March agenda says that minutes from the February meeting were included in the meeting materials, so apparently the minutes exist but were simply never published. An April meeting is also noted on the March agenda, so it seems the committee has been meeting monthly as usual but not publishing its agendas and minutes.

The SHIN-NY Policy Committee has an obligation to meet “at least monthly or as circumstances dictate,” according to the SOP. Documents from past years show it typically meets 10 times a year, skipping December and January. It and other SHIN-NY committees have an obligation to publish minutes from their meetings in a “timely” manner.

Elsewhere on the same NYeC website page, the SHIN-NY Statewide Data Use Committee (SDUC) has published an agenda for a meeting today. No previous agendas or minutes are available. The Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) provides information about all of the policies it has approved but offers no meeting minutes or agendas. Those committees meet less frequently than the Policy Committee but still have requirements to publish agendas and minutes in their charters.

Policy Committee members are listed on the page—from 2025. Halfway through 2026, there is no public information about who is even on the main SHIN-NY committee:

Screenshot of the NYeC website on June 11, 2026

If you think I’m being picky about bureaucrats being behind on their paperwork, consider that there are many important decisions being made right now about how all of our personal, HIPAA-protected health records can be shared, accessed by authorities, and used. In New York, the SHIN-NY committees run by NYeC are discussing those decisions and generating policy proposals for the health department to sign off on. The public should be kept up to date about them.

In fact, it’s my opinion that the requirements for transparency, which are not currently being met, are insufficient.

The New York State Department of Health committees, the New York City Board of Health, and other public health entities livestream their meetings and publish video archives of them. Journalists and the public can watch them to understand how decisions are being made about public health services, policies, and data use.

The SHIN-NY committees run by NYeC should be no different. They should also make their meetings publicly available through livestreams and video archives. Decisions about how New Yorkers’ personal health information is handled shouldn’t be made behind closed doors. We should be fully informed about how our information is accessed and used.

I have sent questions about the lapse in public reporting on SHIN-NY committee meetings to both the New York State Department of Health and NYeC. NYeC has not responded, but I’m in touch with the health department and hope to have more information from them soon about why the lapse has happened and what will be done about it.

I’ll update this story when I hear from them.

No, Dr. Oz, Our Medical Records Don't Belong to Us. That Matters More Than Ever Now.

Aimee — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:30:23 GMT

“Listen, you own your medical records.” Dr. Oz declares in a promotional video put out by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

“Listen, you own your medical records,” says Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz in a promotional video.

Oz, the CMS Administrator, is joined in the video by then FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, who chimes in with his concurring second opinion at the end: “Those records belong to the American patient. They belong to you.”

In case you’re not convinced by their authority or the invigorating background music, Dr. Oz explains: “You paid for them one way or another.” Of course! You paid for them, so they belong to you, right?

Well, no.

But I get it: Dr. Oz is running Medicare, not the Fed. He may be unfamiliar with financial concepts like renting, leasing, and licensing. Those are the kinds of transactions our money is increasingly likely to go toward when we pay for things, and most of us ordinary Americans are aware that simply paying money for something doesn’t necessarily mean we own it.

“Americans own their healthcare records,” says Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at a December 2025 White House event (at 1:45:39 in the video).

The fact is that our medical records don’t belong to us in any sense of legal ownership. When clinical notes, lab and imaging results, and all sorts of other data are added to our records by healthcare professionals, that information does not become our property by law.

That’s why we have rules and regulations, in HIPAA and elsewhere, granting us access to the health information collected about us and some degree of control over how it is shared and used.

If we owned our own medical records, we wouldn’t need those regulations. We could store all our own medical records on our own devices, delete the part that shows we’ve been eating way too many Snickers bars, and tell our doctors to get rid of any copies they have in their systems. We could tell them to cease and desist from keeping the records if they put up a fuss. If you think I’m wrong about medical record property rights, please give that a try and let me know how it goes.

“But what about New Hampshire?” savvy readers might ask. Yes, you’re right: New Hampshire is the only state in the nation that actually does have a law granting individuals ownership of the “medical information contained in [their] medical records.”

However, the records themselves belong to the provider who created them, and state regulations require providers to retain records for seven years after last contact with a patient—just like in other states. In practice, the New Hampshire law gives people about the same level of control over their records as HIPAA. That is to say, it gives them the ability to access their medical records.

Nowhere in the United States do individuals have property rights to their medical records that grant full legal ownership—in the way that copyright and trademark laws do, for example.

Here is former Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Dr. Micky Tripathi on a 2024 podcast, explaining the fact that laws and regulations give us the right to access our complete medical records, but do not grant us ownership of them (beginning at 17:21):

And yet, “You own your medical records” and “Your medical records belong to you” have become mantras for Health and Human Services officials. President Trump himself has been using this language since his first term. At a 2020 event announcing his “America First Healthcare Plan,” he said (27:31):

The America First Healthcare Plan will deliver another long awaited reform: We will put you in control of your own medical records . . . We’ll require doctors to make your records available electronically, and you’ll own them, and you’ll control them, and they will be portable, and you’ll be able to work seamlessly with all of your medical providers. [emphasis mine]

“We’ll require doctors to make your records available electronically, and you’ll own them,” says President Trump at a 2020 event (at 27:48 in the video).

That healthcare plan never materialized, but in 2021 under the Biden administration, the ONC Cures Act Final Rule did indeed introduce requirements for health care providers to make patients’ complete electronic medical records available to them upon request (with some exceptions). Before that, they were only obliged to hand over a subset of basic information in a record, as defined by the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI).

But the Final Rule did not in any way give patients ownership of their records, and neither did any other regulatory changes that came after it.

The language about medical record ownership is only used in political speeches and at events where HHS officials are promoting their latest health IT program. You won’t find it in any legal or regulatory documents.

Even the outline for the America First Healthcare Plan proposed giving patients “control” and “access,” to their records, carefully avoiding any reference to ownership. Trump’s new “Great Healthcare Plan” proposal doesn’t mention medical records at all.

Papering Over the Power Networked Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Bring to Authorities

So why do Dr. Oz and other HHS officials keep saying our medical records belong to us, that we own them? Here’s my take:

It’s because they’re building a health data infrastructure that will collect and store an extensive profile of every individual, and make it accessible to authorized users anywhere in the world, and many people are uncomfortable with that.

Many of the medical freedom voters in the MAHA faction of Trump’s coalition are strongly opposed to it. They’re opposed to everything it’s built on, from digital ID and biometric data collection to wearables and AI medical tech.

The HHS crew keeps talking about how we own our medical records to assuage fears about technocracy and medical authoritarianism, and gain public support for the system they’re building. They decided that the benefits of building a data dragnet outweigh the civil liberties risks, and they’re trying to keep MAHA on board.

“It’s OK!,” they’re saying. “We’re building the personal surveillance system you have feared and fought against, but you’ll be in charge of it. It will belong to you!” Because you paid for it, or something.

The new health data infrastructure that is rapidly coming into place will truly be, as Trump might put it, something no one has ever seen before.

The amount, granularity, and scope of information it will be able to gather and store on every individual; the coding systems that transform the information into structured, actionable data; and its networked accessibility have the potential to make the health data system at least as powerful a resource for personal data as any existing commercial or government data system.

I haven’t been calling it the “health data leviathan” for nothing.

Everyone who has their hair on fire about Palantir merging databases full of personal information should take a moment to look at just how comprehensive the data sets collected in the already unified system of “medical records” are shaping up to be.

As I’ve pointed out before, “medical records” can contain much more information than what most people think of as having to do with medicine. All kinds of information related to mental health, relationships, and personal habits can be collected and assigned medical codes.

More significantly, the addition of “social determinants of health” (SDOH) data to medical coding created a catch-all way to record details about every aspect of a person’s life.

Social determinants of health are typically described as “the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age.” New SDOH codes that describe non-medical details about an individual’s life are being generated continuously and added to the code sets used in medical records.

Methods of collecting information have expanded as well. Wearables, apps, and medical devices collect biometric data; ambient listening AI scribes used in doctors’ offices and telemedicine can note every detail in a conversation; and new technologies the Trump administration is funding will transmit information from inside people’s bodies. All of that data can be coded and entered into your medical records.

There are no limits to the amount of information that can be stored about an individual in a modern digital system, and the difficulty of managing large collections of personal data and making them useful is easily addressed by the scoring systems in current use and the AI agents being put in place.

The MAHA HHS takes every opportunity to emphasize to the public that this growing trove of data will catapult us into a future of deep health insights and groundbreaking cures. Storing oodles of personal information on networked servers is what we must do to put the power of health information in your very own hands, they tell us—and there’s nothing to worry about, because it belongs to you. Except it doesn’t.

The Data Sharing Consent of the Governed

So if you don’t own your health records and have full property rights to them, what kind of control over how they’re used do you have?

HIPAA, the ONC Final Rule, and state regulations lay down the fundamental rules about who can access individuals’ health information and under what circumstances. First, as I’ve described, individuals have the right to access all of their own health records that fall under HIPAA—in other words, information collected by health care providers, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses—which together are known as “covered entities”—and their business associates.

HIPAA lays out clear rules prohibiting covered entities from selling individuals’ health records, and its privacy rule requires individuals to consent before their providers can share their records with other parties whom they have no relationship with.

But those consent rules don’t apply to sharing health information with the government.

The HIPAA privacy rule makes exceptions to the consent rules for public health authorities. They can access data in your health records if they present a reason why doing so is needed to conduct “public health activities.”

Those activities are very broadly defined, including conducting “public health surveillance, public health investigations, and public health interventions,” or lessening “a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of a person or the public.”

Essentially, the law allows public health authorities themselves to define what valid public health activities are and therefore which information in individuals’ medical records they have the authority to access without the individuals’ knowledge or consent.

With the SDOH expansion of public health authorities’ purview to cover all areas of life, almost no category of personal information stored in individuals’ electronic health records is off limits. (There is a notable exception. More on that later.)

During the eras of paper medical records and non-networked electronic medical records, the barrier to federal, state, and local health departments having direct, up-to-the-minute access to everyone’s health records was technical, not legal. That barrier is rapidly coming down.

As state health information exchange (HIE) networks are put in place and both state and private-sector record holders connect to TEFCA, the national “network of networks,” the technical ability for government authorities to tap into every individual’s health records increases.

As networks expand and connect, moving toward a data infrastructure with full interoperability, regulatory bodies are putting HIPAA-compliant bureaucratic systems in place to give public health authorities access to the information they want.

In New York, for example, state health department authorities access information from patients’ medical records through the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY).

Every general hospital in the state is connected to the SHIN-NY, along with many clinics, HMOs, home care agencies, nursing homes, and hospices. You can find a list of organizations that are required to connect as “regulated participants” as well as those that can do so voluntarily on page 47 of the SHIN-NY’s Statewide Common Participation Agreement. Voluntary SHIN-NY participation extends the SHIN-NY’s reach beyond the realm of medical facilities by including community-based social service organizations.

State and local health departments can access data elements from every individual who receives medical or social services from one of those providers in the following approved categories:

Childhood Obesity
Respiratory Illness Surveillance
Health Related Social Needs Data
Hospitalizations Analysis for CDPAP Recipients
Lyme Disease Surveillance
[June 2026 update: The following data set has been submitted for approval:
Parkinsons Disease Prevalence in New York State]

What that means for you if you live in New York is that if you have ever received care from a provider connected to the SHIN-NY (any hospital, for example), your records are available through the SHIN-NY. Those records may include not only information from the SHIN-NY-connected provider you saw, but also information from other providers that could be matched to your identity.

Authorized health department staff have direct access to records through dedicated online portals for public health users of the SHIN-NY. They won’t be able to see your full record, but they will be able to view the elements in the core USCDI data set and other data sets that have been approved for public health use.

Once your medical records have been connected to the SHIN-NY through a participating provider, there is no way for you to remove them or deny access to them by public health authorities.

You can control which providers have access to your medical records by granting or denying consent to share them on a form provided by one of the SHIN-NY’s six regional subnetworks (a single statewide consent form is in the works). You can give consent for emergency access only. If you deny consent for providers to access your records, they’ll be able to find your name in the system, but they won’t be able to see your information.

You can even sign a special Universal Denial of Consent Form that will stop providers and health plans from seeing any results at all when they search for your name or other identifying information in their online portal to the SHIN-NY.

On those forms, you will see text like this:

Public Health agencies will remain eligible to access my clinical data in accordance with applicable NYS public health laws.

Public health workers use a different SHIN-NY portal to access your medical records than providers, and what they can see is determined by what authorities have decided to grant access to, not by your knowledge or consent.

This section of the Universal Denial of Consent Form available to patients through the Bronx RHIO, one of the SHIN-NY’s subnetworks, explains the public health access exception:

The USCDI is continually being updated to new versions, and public health authorities can request approval for use of new categories of data from the SHIN-NY Statewide Data Use Committee. The information public health authorities have access to will change over time, according to the priorities of the people in charge.

I have focused on New York’s health data infrastructure to give you a detailed look at how government access to medical records works. Other states have or are developing similar systems.

Dr. Oz, RFK Jr., and President Trump himself can get together with a banjo and sing “Your records belong to yooooo!” in a three-part harmony all day long, and it will do nothing to change the access public health authorities have to your personal health information.

Engineering Outcomes in Health and More

You might be thinking,“So what?” Public health authorities have been collecting information from medical records in the United States since the 19th century. It has mostly been a process running in the background of daily life—something people might only notice if they got a contact-tracing call from the health department.

Over most of the past 150 years or so, public health authorities have required health care professionals to give them just a tiny amount of information from the medical records they kept on paper. They used it to detect outbreaks, monitor diseases, allocate resources, and try to figure out if their public health efforts were working.

Switching from a paper record system to a networked electronic one makes public health surveillance a whole new ballgame. With the new system coming into place, there’s no technical limit to how much information a medical record can hold or how much of it authorities can access.

The question for them now is not what they can do with a very limited amount of health data but what they should do with a constant, up-to-the-minute, unlimited supply of it.

One answer to that question has been: “Make America Healthy Again.” Despite the anti-technocratic bent of the movement that swept them to power, RFK Jr. and his MAHA crew have put the pedal to the metal on health data infrastructure modernization.

They have also embraced data-driven value-based payment as a means of promoting better health outcomes. They are rapidly replacing the old fee-for-service systems with financial incentive structures that reward doctors for improvements in their patients’ health instead of just paying them for procedures and appointments.

New programs like Medicare ACCESS reward providers for collaborating with patients in using health-monitoring technology to prevent and manage chronic illnesses. The ACCESS plan explains: “Participating organizations will receive recurring payments for managing patients’ qualifying conditions, with full payment tied to achieving measurable health outcomes.”

If the MAHA HHS has departed from its grassroots base by accelerating the rollout of health data technology, it has stayed true to them by focusing on empowering individuals to improve their own health.

The technology it’s promoting most is geared toward helping individuals collect their own personal data in collaboration with their doctors to gain a holistic understanding of their health and use diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes to improve it.

Even its efforts to advance technology for developing personalized pharmaceutical products, which has been off-putting to some MAHA supporters, are based on an individualized view of health.

The MAHA movement’s ethos values individual agency and autonomy, treating physical health as something intertwined with other personal and spiritual aspects of an individual. MAHA supporters tend to view pharmaceutical solutions and institutional approaches to managing health with suspicion.

That is not the prevailing view in the vast public health establishment. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The social determinants of health framework is the zeitgeist there. Instead of seeing health as something individuals can control and improve through their own efforts, the SDOH worldview sees people as largely powerless against societal factors that determine the state of their health.

SDOH adherents frequently cite the obviously unprovable claim that 80 to 90 percent of a person’s health status is determined by social determinants of health. Those determinants, they insist, are beyond the control of individuals and can only be addressed by transforming society.

SDOH determinism is of a piece with the vein of left-wing political philosophy that has risen to electoral prominence and institutional power during this century. It describes improving the health of marginalized and oppressed people by changing the conditions in which they live as the task of public health authorities.

The SDOH determinists don’t just blur the line between medical issues (and records) and every other socioeconomic factor—they erase it completely, viewing every aspect of life as a matter of health and therefore within the purview of public health policy. In this context, health data becomes a socioeconomic engineering tool for public health authorities.

The guiding light of the SDOH determinists is “health equity.” Here’s how New York State’s Health Equity Plan defines it:

Health equity means everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be healthy, where no one is limited in achieving optimal health because of who they are or where they live. This means that to work towards health equity, everyone must be able to access and experience the conditions in life that contribute to optimal health: safe and secure housing, steady and livable income, quality education, social support networks, quality health care, nutritious food, safe transportation, green spaces, clean air and water, and freedom from discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, or any other part of one’s identity.

The SDOH determinists judge whether health equity has been achieved by group outcomes: We will reach health equity when all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic subpopulations have the same health outcomes. Until then, public health authorities must reach into every sector of society to engineer “conditions in life that contribute to optimal health.”

The New (York) Public Health Determinists

If you’re looking for the MAHA HHS’s arch-nemesis, New York is a good place to start. Since RFK Jr. took the helm as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the state’s political and public health establishment has been working assiduously to counter his efforts.

Governor Kathy Hochul has signed legislation allowing the state to substitute guidance from various U.S. and international organizations for HHS guidance on vaccinations, New York City’s city council passed resolutions in support of that, and both the state and NYC health commissioners have made their general opposition to RFK Jr.’s HHS administration clear.

Both the state and NYC are at the forefront of the health equity movement in public health. They have spent the past several years expanding Medicaid to address social determinants of health, producing health equity studies and policy plans, and assembling new committees and working groups to advance the health equity agenda.

When New York City’s new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, chose a health commissioner, he opted for Dr. Alister Martin. Martin is the founder of A Healthier Democracy, a nonprofit that advocates for healthcare workers and institutions “to leverage political organizing tactics to create positive social change.”

Through its initiatives, A Healthier Democracy seeks to engage patients in civic activities and connect them to government resources—and also to influence policymaking affecting social determinants of health. One of its goals is to address what SDOH adherents call the “political determinants of health” (PDOH). The term was coined by public health scholar Daniel Dawes, who wrote the 2020 book with that title.

In The Political Determinants of Health, Dawes argues that health disparities between groups are largely due to social determinants, which are produced by political determinants. The political determinants, in turn, are underpinned by societal structures that have developed over the course of history, most notably structural racism.

Dawes describes the political determinants of health as falling into three core categories: voting, government, and policy. The task for public health advocates set forth by the PDOH framework is to change the political landscape by addressing those categories. Improvements to social determinants are expected to follow from that, bringing populations closer to health equity.

The website for A Healthier Democracy presents its mission as tackling the PDOH “root issues,” explaining:

80% of a patient’s health outcomes are due to issues outside of clinical care setting including housing insecurity, food insecurity, and upstream issues influenced by the political determinants of health.

The organization is addressing those PDOH through initiatives like Vot-ER, which brings voter registration into the doctor’s office. Doctors working with Vot-ER ask patients whether they’re registered to vote and help them get registered if they aren’t.

As a nonprofit organization, A Healthier Democracy and its Vot-ER program maintain a nonpartisan position. Participating doctors are not encouraged to recommend candidates or political parties. Dr. Martin explained this in a 2020 conversation with the Editor in Chief of the AMA Journal of Ethics, Dr. Audiey Kao: “As your doctor, I cannot tell you who to vote for,” he said.

But Martin goes on to describe how he uses his voter registration conversations with patients to promote the SDOH/PDOH worldview and recommend policies to vote for, telling them:

Eighty percent of your health is due to what we call the social determinants of health, and only 20 percent is actually sort of what’s happening in this room . . . so in order for us to make you healthier we need to be doing all we can to vote for the policies and for the positions that make the social determinants of health and your environment, your lived experience, healthier for you.

New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Alister Martin explains how he responds to questions from patients about whom to vote for in a 2020 conversation with Dr. Audiey Kao from the AMA Journal of Ethics (at 14:00 in the video)..

As New York City’s health commissioner, Martin is in a prime position for addressing political and social determinants of health. It remains to be seen how exactly he will do that. As an advocate, he has focused on connecting people with government resources through initiatives like Link-Health and promoting access to preventive medicine interventions like vaccination through public outreach campaigns.

Martin doesn’t seem to have a record of supporting authoritarian policies and mandates, or using individuals’ health information to craft and enforce them. Thus far, his approach has seemed more practical than ideological.

But he’s just getting started. At a recent Board of Health meeting, he presided over a presentation recommending the City make “anti-racism, health-related” revisions to the city charter and establish a “Data for Equity” working group to “apply an intersectional, anti-racism equity lens to public health data.”

The next year will show whether he maintains his pragmatic approach and sticks to providing guidance and access to services, or takes a more heavy-handed ideological turn.

Screenshot from the May 19, 2026, New York City Board of Health meeting.

Martin’s predecessor, former Acting Health Commissioner Dr. Michelle Morse, offers a good example of a public health official who combines a heavily ideological approach with a preference for heavy-handed governance. Morse did not leave New York City government when Martin became commissioner, but has stayed on in her role as the health department’s Chief Medical Officer.

A founder of EqualHealth, an organization devoted to “building critical consciousness and collective global action in pursuit of health equity for all,” Morse is a proponent of social medicine. The EqualHealth website defines social medicine as:

an approach to health that recognizes the centrality of the social and structural determination of health, integrates social theory to understand social forces that marginalize and harm communities, and builds collective power to challenge oppression and support the struggle for social justice

This ideological approach to public health and healthcare doesn’t just draw connections between societal factors and health. It seamlessly blends the social, economic, political, personal, and medical. For example, Morse has advocated using reparations for slavery to improve COVID-19 outcomes and collecting household wealth information as health data.

The term critical consciousness, used by EqualHealth, was coined by the Brazilian Marxist educational theorist Paulo Freire, as conscientização in the original Portuguese. It’s an expansion of the anti-colonial Marxist Frantz Fanon’s French term conscientiser, which Fanon used to name the process of becoming aware of oppressive structures. Freire expanded the concept to describe it as the first step toward revolutionary action.

Dr. Morse’s social medicine approach brings the revolutionary politics of Freire and Fanon into the realm of public health. She recently co-authored a paper advocating for an approach to academic global public health that combines “settler colonialism and racial capitalism” frameworks to challenge “widespread epistemic and material injustice.”

In addition to her ideological position, Dr. Morse has a record of supporting authoritarian public health policy. When the firefighters’ union sued to try to block New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate on municipal workers in the fall of 2021, Morse submitted an affirmation to the court in support of it. The City’s workplace vaccine mandates led to firings and other job losses of thousands of New Yorkers.

I’m not singling Dr. Morse out as an exception. On the contrary, many, if not most, public health officials share her views.

In a February 2023 talk at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Morse joined former New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett on a panel to talk about “Reimagining Public Health for NYC: A Discussion on the Racial Wealth Gap and Health Equity.”

Like Morse, Bassett is a health equity advocate and SDOH/PDOH determinist. Also like Morse, she actively upheld the workplace COVID-19 vaccine mandates put in place by her predecessor, Dr. Howard Zucker. Those mandates, in the healthcare sector, court system, and state agencies, put an estimated 34,000 people out of work.

Bassett also created a system of racial preference for the distribution of monoclonal antibodies and antiviral medications to treat COVID-19 in 2021. As acting state health commissioner, she designated “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity” as a medical risk factor, which meant that in the event of a shortage, non-white individuals would have received the treatments before white individuals, all other medical risk factors being equal.

During the panel discussion, the two former health commissioners pointed to slavery, structural racism, and racial wealth gaps as drivers of health inequities. They advocated “race-conscious solutions,” redistributive economic policies, and personal data collection to address health disparities between groups.

Morse attributed black New Yorkers having a relatively low rate of COVID-19 vaccination to “inequity and exclusion,” disregarding the fact that many simply didn’t want to take the shot.

In fact, many of the middle- and working-class New Yorkers who lost their jobs, and sometimes their homes, under the mandates these two Harvard-educated women supported were African-American and Caribbean-American. Numerous people I’ve spoken with have compared the mandates to the slavery their ancestors were subjected to.

Apparently Drs. Morse and Bassett didn’t think the paychecks and health insurance they lost would be as effective at mitigating COVID-19 symptoms as reparation payments. They and much of the public health establishment are focused on using the power of government to achieve the societal changes they want to see, rather than putting more decision-making power in individuals’ hands.

My point here is not to wade into arguments about structural racism or reparations or any of the particular concerns of today’s SDOH/PDOH determinists. Tomorrow’s might have other preoccupations. It is to shed light on the deterministic, ideologically driven, and often revolutionary worldview that leads so many in the public health sector to see their mission as nothing less than transforming all of society.

The MAHA HHS administrators may be aiming to empower individuals to improve their own lives with the help of health data, but the infrastructure they’re constructing to gather that data and make it easily accessible will exist long after they’re gone.

They are building a vehicle that will hurtle us into a future of pervasive and expansive health data gathering and ubiquitous health record accessibility, but they will not always be behind the wheel.

There is a very strong chance that Drs. Martin and Morse and the thousands of other SDOH/PDOH determinists who make up the public health bureaucracy at every level of government and in the nonprofit sector will be sliding back into the national health data driver’s seat over the next few election cycles.

The health data infrastructure and value-based payment systems that the MAHA HHS is putting in place now will be ideal mechanisms for enforcing compliance with public health mandates and incentivizing adherence to policies designed to drive not just individual outcomes but population-level ones.

The systems the Trump administration is building to put the power of health information into patients’ hands will also be powerful tools for public health socioeconomic engineers.

Health Data Tech Disruptors

I want to emphasize that the question of health record ownership and control is not technical. It is a legal issue. There are technologists inventing systems for storing medical records on your own devices, having full control of access, and ensuring accuracy and security. One doctor recently patented a blockchain-based system.

But unless you’re creating your own medical records, you won’t own them and you won’t be able to control the access authorities have to them. Your health records will belong to the organizations that generated them and be stored in their networked EHR systems, and access to them will be governed by existing laws and regulations.

I can imagine a future in which you can do all your own labs and scanning with gadgets at home and consult with your own personal, private AI doctor. When you need something fixed, you’ll just snap the optional surgery arm onto the Optimus robot you bought to mow your lawn and set it to medical mode.

Like one of the hive-mind post-humans in Pluribus, your robot will become whatever kind of medical professional you need. You’ll sync your private medical records with its brain and won’t need to share them anywhere. But we’re not there yet.

And while you’re fantasizing about that scenario of technology-enabled medical autonomy, you should keep in mind that your robot could also come with a government-activated prison guard mode. Whether it does will be determined once again by the laws we decide to put in place.

No matter how advanced technology gets, its uses will depend on the rules we decide to create as a society.

The HIPAA Privacy Rule Is Due for an Update

A small army of bureaucrats has been working for years to create new consent systems that will allow patients to control which healthcare providers and other third parties have access to their medical records.

At the state level, they sit on committees like the SHIN-NY’s Policy Committee, trying to create a workable statewide consent form for sharing medical records. At the Sequoia Project, they sort through the tangle of state and federal laws to craft a digital consent system that will work nationwide with TEFCA.

These bureaucrats have been trying to create systems that will allow information in health records to be tagged and categorized so that patients can have more granular control over how information is shared and with whom. With a more detailed digital consent system, new legal protections could be added to certain categories of data or offered as options for patients to select when signing consent forms.

But the public never sees this group of people deciding what kind of control they will have over how their own health information is shared. They’re not in the headlines, like Dr. Oz.

Their priorities tend to be the priorities of the public health establishment. They’re not concerned about protecting information from public health mandates or overreach by SDOH socioeconomic engineers.

They want to add extra protections for information about medical services related to reproduction and “gender-affirming care.” They’ve been worried that officials on the political right will use individuals’ health records in those categories for criminal prosecutions.

They aren’t wrong. The Trump administration is doing that right now. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas recently sent grand jury subpoenas to several healthcare institutions across the United States, including NYU Langone, demanding they hand over detailed medical records for patients under the age of 18 who have received “sex-rejecting procedures.”

In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and legal efforts to ban “gender-affirming care,” Democrats moved quickly to put extra protections for related medical procedures and records in place. In New York, they created the Shield Law, which is actually a set of state laws. It’s unlikely to block a federal grand jury subpoena, and Langone will probably have to hand over the records.

Many conservatives are pleased to see the government going after “gender-affirming care” practitioners, because they consider it to be medical malpractice. The records being requested will be used to penalize institutions and medical professionals, not patients.

But they should keep in mind that the subpoenas demonstrate the fact that even the most protected medical records can become accessible to authorities. Another administration with different priorities could access other kinds of information.

Some of the efforts to protect certain categories of information have been through changes to existing regulations. In 2024, the Biden administration issued a HIPAA Privacy Rule to Support Reproductive Health Care Privacy. It added special protections for medical records related to reproductive health care. In 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas vacated it.

But HHS also issued a new privacy rule for medical records related to substance use disorders in 2024, requiring data shared with public health authorities without consent to have the patient’s identity removed. That rule stuck. It’s a rare exception to authorities’ ability to access medical records for “public health activities” without patient knowledge or consent and with patient identity intact.

That rare exception shows that exceptions can be made. Protections can be strengthened, and patient information can be shielded from government access and overreach. It’s a question of political will.

The HIPAA Privacy Rule is due for an update. Proposed modifications were floated back in 2021, but nothing moved forward. That might change this year. In January, health sector press picked up on the fact that HHS was talking about updating the HIPAA Privacy Rule with American Indian Tribal authorities. That led them to speculate that a Privacy Rule update is on the horizon. I’m keeping an eye out for that.

Meanwhile, in legal news, medical freedom advocate Leslie Manookian has announced that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lower court decision against Los Angeles United School District workers who were fired for refusing to comply with a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

That decision, Manookian writes, essentially ruled that:

even if a “vaccine” like the Covid-19 injection is well-known to fail to stop transmission or infection, it can still be mandated if an administrator has a reason to think it might work to help protect public health or the vague promise of “safety.”

The court’s logic, she explains, could be applied not only to vaccines but to other medical interventions. SCOTUS endorsed that logic by declining to hear the case, Health Freedom Defense Fund et al. v. Alberto Carvalho.

With SDOH determinists expanding the purview of public health to include every area of life, strictly medical interventions might not be the only thing administrators might think should be mandated to protect public health.

Manookian and the organization she founded, Health Freedom Defense Fund, have been working to put in place legal protections for informed consent and bodily autonomy, most notably in the Idaho Medical Freedom Act.

Those kinds of protections will be all the more important when we have a fully interoperable, government-accessible Internet of health records that stores a mountain of information about every one of us.

What we need as we finish construction on our health data infrastructure is not glib assurances that our medical records belong to us, but an acknowledgment that they don’t and a serious review of the laws and regulations that govern what can be done with them.

A vast bureaucracy that stretches across the public and private sectors is waiting in the wings with grand plans for reshaping not just our healthcare but all of society. Our current system gives it extraordinary powers to access our information and issue rules and mandates that are enforced like laws.

The laws and rules we put in place now about how our health information can be used by authorities will shape our future freedoms, and not just the medical ones.

Independent Media Voices Speak at Brooklyn's DJT Republican Club

Aimee — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:06:06 GMT

On April 30, 2026, the Donald J. Trump Kings County Republican Club devoted its monthly meeting to a special event addressing independent media and the First Amendment.

Speakers from three media outlets Zoomed into the event, and four independent journalists spoke in person.

I was one of the speakers, and I want to thank the club for the opportunity to talk about the vitally important topic of freedom of speech and of the press. Thank you also to Jimmy Wagner for his kind introduction.

You can watch the full event in the video above. The speakers include:

Barbara Boyd from Promethean Action (01:25)

Andrew Muller from New American (27:15)

Joe the Box from The America First Warehouse (49:15)

Rosangel Pérez from Cafecito Break (01:08:15 in the full video):

I spoke at 01:29:45 in the full video. You can also see what I had to say here:

Radically Conservative host Stephanie Liggio (01:59:30)

Robert Pearl (02:06:40)

At the end of the meeting (from 21:30:00), Bronx Conservative Party District Leader Dion Powell spoke briefly about a TPUSA RISE voter registration initiative, and DJT Club founder Jimmy Wagner talked about the club’s initiative proposing changes to the New York City Charter.

Freedom of Speech Is Essential. Here's What I Had to Say about That at the DJT Club.

Aimee — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:57:46 GMT

On April 30, 2026, the Donald J. Trump Kings County Republican Club devoted its monthly meeting to a special event addressing independent media and the First Amendment.

Speakers from three media outlets Zoomed into the event, and four independent journalists spoke in person.

You can watch the full event here:

"Reporting with Integrity Matters.": Rosangel Pérez from Cafecito Break Speaks at DJT Club Event

Aimee — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:19:54 GMT

On April 30, 2026, the Donald J. Trump Kings County Republican Club devoted its monthly meeting to a special event addressing independent media and the First Amendment.

Speakers from three media outlets Zoomed into the event, and four independent journalists spoke in person.

You can watch the full event here:

The Firsthand Report ⌗6

Aimee — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:33:53 GMT

☞ We’ve arrived, everybody. The era of comprehensive mobile AI health management apps is here. I’m talking about smartphone apps that can pull in all of your medical records from every provider you’ve ever seen, data from wearables, and any other health secrets you’re inclined to whisper into its earbots, then tell you you’d better opt for the grain bowl and drop that donut stat.

We’ve been moving toward widespread use of this kind of personalized, comprehensive health management app for some time, but there have been significant barriers to the technology taking off.

First, our systems for sharing medical records are still under development, sometimes making it difficult for apps to reliably access them. Second, U.S. health information privacy protections are complicated. We have HIPAA rules for medical records, but those only apply to health care providers and clearinghouses, health plans, and their business associates. Consumer health data collected by apps, wearables, and companies is governed by a patchwork of state laws.

Those barriers have slowed the development and adoption of hybrid apps that aggregate medical records and consumer health data. Apps like Apple Health have had the technical capabilities required for a while, but only 7% of consumers were estimated to have used an app to combine medical records from multiple sources in 2024.

AI tools to analyze all the data and provide user-friendly advice instead of just a catalog of records have also only recently become ready for prime time.

Now, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are embracing AI and vaulting over the barriers by pushing the health sector to adopt data-sharing standards, rolling out digital identity verification for Medicare recipients, and putting their own stamp of approval on apps that meet high privacy and security standards.

CMS HELD AN EVENT LAST WEEK TO LAUNCH THE “FIRST WAVE” OF ITS HEALTH DATA NETWORK ADVANCES AND CMS-APPROVED APPS, which you can find in the Medicare App Library. It includes both the kinds of hybrid, AI-driven apps I’ve been describing and some more narrowly focused tech.

Health and Human Services is obviously trying to use Medicare to lead the way to a “fully digital, patient-centered health system” for everyone. That seems like an effective strategy, since there are nearly 70 million Medicare recipients and they tend to go to the doctor a lot.

I’d say we’re at a tipping point.

You can watch the full First Wave Launch event here:

☞ Hey, remember those crazy people who thought the government was trying to inject us all with microchips during COVID? Well, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (Arpa-H), has launched a new initiative called Delphi (yes, it’s named for the oracle), with the goal of developing wearable and ingestible BIOSENSORS THAT WILL “ENABLE CONTINUOUS, REAL-TIME MONITORING of deep biological signals for everyone.”

The agency is soliciting proposals for the development of “tiny, smart, next-generation ‘chiplets’ that optimize delivery of real-time insights of important internal signals like hormones, immune markers, and therapeutic drug levels,” and detect the “earliest signs of disease and remotely fine-tune treatments.”

You can read all the details on the Delphi website or watch this presentation on it:

☞ THE RELIGIOUS LIBERTY COMMISSION HELD A LENGTHY FINAL HEARING YESTERDAY. The Commission is scheduled to deliver its report on the state of religious freedom in the United States to President Trump this spring.

I’ve heard from numerous New Yorkers that they wrote to the Commission to tell their stories of religious discrimination under NYC’s workplace COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and one of them testified at a hearing in February. A mother and daughter pair also testified in March about religious discrimination under New York State’s childhood vaccine mandates.

Guiding the Impact, an organization that advocated for the Commission to hear testimony related to medical mandate religious exemptions, is leading a letter-writing campaign to urge the commissioners to include that issue in their report.

☞ Speaking of commissions, the New York State Civil Service Commission is meeting tomorrow, and REINSTATEMENT OF NYC WORKERS who were fired under the COVID-19 vaccine mandates is once again NOT ON THE AGENDA. The Commission must receive a rule change proposal from NYC and approve it for many of the reinstatements, which were promised by former mayor Eric Adams, to go forward.

Mayor Mamdani held an event celebrating his first 100 days in office last weekend, touting his efforts in support of workers, but the City workers seeking reinstatement were not on his list. It has been 86 days since he told me he would “follow up” on the issue. No word yet.

MEDIA RADAR

📡 Bravest for Choice leader Matt Connor wrote about that organization’s efforts on behalf of O’Brian Pastrana and other FDNY firefighters who suffered adverse effects after taking a mandated COVID-19 vaccine. You can read his article on the Children’s Health Defense website and watch Pastrana speak at a March event in Albany on Cafecito Break’s Substack.

The Firsthand Report ⌗5

Aimee — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:56:51 GMT

☞ DIGITAL AND BIOMETRIC IDENTITY ADOPTION IS ACCELERATING IN THE HEALTH SECTOR. In March, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services introduced digital identity verification as a new way for Medicare recipients to set up and access their accounts.

They can use CLEAR, ID.Me or Login.gov ID verification to create accounts and access their health records with passkeys and biometric logins. (Yes, that’s the same CLEAR people use at the airport.) The new tools are optional, and standard user-ID+password logins can still be used—for now.

Private sector providers and states have also been adopting digital ID access for health record portals. For example, New Yorkers using the state’s MyHealthRecordNY network can access their medical records with CLEAR.

Identity verification through a third-party service like CLEAR is the most common form of digital ID being implemented. In South Carolina, ID.me identity verification is now required for Medicaid recipients.

The kind of digital ID credential that you store in a digital wallet isn’t in use in the health sector much yet, but that could change. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which creates digital ID standards, is working on accelerating the adoption of mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) as a form of digital ID for banking, government benefit programs, and “digital healthcare.” You can read a draft of NIST’s mDL plans and comment on it through May 8.

One obvious reason for digital ID adoption is security. Verified digital IDs are harder for hackers and fraudsters to exploit than password systems. Electronic health record (EHR) systems that match patients’ identities to their medical records by using demographic data matching are considered less reliable than linking records to a single verified identity. People want their health data to be secure, and fraud also increases costs.

But there’s a deeper reason why the pace is picking up: As HealthEx CEO Priyanka Agarwal recently explained at the ASTP annual meeting, “the foundation for our work is digital identity.” Her company’s work is unifying all of an individual’s lifetime of health records, from every source, “to share with providers, insurers, caregivers, and AI tools.” (HealthEx recently partnered with Microsoft to integrate medical record access into Microsoft’s Copilot AI.)

The health data infrastructure being built across the public and private sectors will make everything in your records available through a single digital/biometric ID access point, anywhere in the world. As I’ve pointed out, health records can contain an extensive trove of information about every individual—and not just medical information.

Laying the digital ID foundation for this infrastructure means linking a potentially very detailed personal profile to a single, unchangeable ID that can also be used (and required) for an array of other purposes—like getting on a plane or getting into your bank account.

If the pace keeps picking up, critics of digital and biometric ID who have been fighting its adoption in airports, banks, and DMVs might be blindsided by rapid mass adoption of it at the doctor’s office.

VIDEO REPORT

Last weekend, I went out to see what New Yorkers on the left had to say at the “NO KINGS” MANHATTAN MARCH AND THE “TAX THE RICH” RALLY IN THE BRONX, where Senator Bernie Sanders spoke.

_🎥Fundamental issues of governance are kind of the theme of “No Kings,” but I was still struck by how much protesters brought up basic civil liberties when I asked them why they were protesting.

They talked about Trump infringing on freedom of speech and of the press, citing examples like his lawsuits against major media outlets. They were worried about freedom of assembly being limited in the future and people being prevented from voting.

“No Kings” interviews:

I suppose the good news here is that Americans across the political spectrum value civil liberties, even though they see threats to them coming from different directions.

I found it ironic that I was hearing so much about Trump infringing on freedom of speech during a week when many Americans farther to the right were celebrating the Trump administration’s settlement of some major lawsuits against government censorship (see Media Radar below).

_🎥At the “Tax the Rich” rally, I was struck by the pragmatism of the Mamdani voters I spoke with. Younger socialist-leaning New Yorkers like them are often dismissed by conservatives as being rich transplants who have been heavily indoctrinated into radical ideology.

But everyone I spoke with gave me very practical reasons why they’re backing socialists, and none of them seemed to be living too high on the hog. Like other Mamdani voters I’ve talked to, they told me about how cost-of-living issues affect them personally.

As for the history of failed socialist experiments, they don’t give it much weight. They’re focused on the failures of our own system, and they see socialists as the only ones offering them practical, specific solutions.

“Tax the Rich” interviews:

MEDIA RADAR

📡 This past week saw the resolution of some major lawsuits over COVID-era federal government censorship. Notably, the Justice Department SETTLED WITH THE PLAINTIFFS IN MISSOURI V. BIDEN (aka Murthy v. Missouri). Reactions to the settlement have been mixed, however, with some hailing it as a victory for freedom of speech and others being underwhelmed.

If you’re interested in getting both perspectives, check out this commentary from Missouri v. Biden plaintiff Aaron Kheriaty, Twitter Files reporters Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker, and attorney John Vecchione for positive takes on the Missouri v. Biden settlement and this critical take from Techdirt’s Mike Masnick. Masnick’s article also includes the full Missouri v. Biden consent decree for your perusal.

Other recently settled censorship cases include Kennedy v. Biden and The Daily Wire, The Federalist, Texas v. State Department.

"New York Is Just Way Too Expensive": New Yorkers Talk Cost of Living, Socialism at Bronx "Tax the Rich" Rally

Aimee — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:29:29 GMT

Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at a “Tax the Rich” rally at Lehman College in the Bronx on March 29, 2026. The event was organized by NYC’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.

I talked with some of the rallygoers after the event.

Watch Senator Sanders speak at the event:

Watch a livestream of the rally (note there are some transmission delays; the video above is recommended for the Sanders speech):

"Our Democracy Is Not Safe": NYC "No Kings" Marchers Talk About Why They're in the Street

Aimee — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:07:50 GMT

On March 28, 2026, thousands of demonstrators marched against President Donald Trump at the “No Kings” protest in Manhattan.

I talked with some of the protesters about why they were marching.

Watch a livestream of the march:

Senator Bernie Sanders Speaks at NYC-DSA "Tax the Rich" Rally in the Bronx

Aimee — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:59:29 GMT

Brooklyn-born U.S. senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders was the headline speaker at a “Tax the Rich” rally at Lehman College in the Bronx on March 29, 2026.

The rally was organized by NYC’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.

NYC Manhattan "No Kings" March Livestream + Interviews

Aimee — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:44:00 GMT

On March 28, 2026, thousands of demonstrators marched against President Donald Trump at the “No Kings” protest in Manhattan.

I livestreamed the march and talked with some of the protesters about why they were marching.

The Firsthand Report ⌗4

Aimee — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:33:24 GMT

☞ New York public libraries have some new rules. Amendments to the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education adopted this week REQUIRE LIBRARIES TO HAVE BOARD-APPROVED POLICIES ON THE SELECTION OF LIBRARY MATERIALS, reconsideration of library materials, public use of library spaces, codes of conduct, and confidentiality of library records.

The rule change is a response to recent efforts to have books removed from libraries, usually in children’s collections and mainly due to sexual, political, or ideological content.

You can read all the details in this March 8, 2026 presentation given to the Board of Regents by state library officials. It notes several recent Long Island “Freedom to Read challenges” that sought to remove books, including “Materials with pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian viewpoints for adults and children, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and book lists distributed by politically-motivated organizations.”

The new rules seem to be designed to bolster a library’s position when faced with such challenges. They don’t specify what individual library policies should include, but the March 8 presentation notes these elements of a good policy:

Taxpayers have a right to challenge materials that have been purchased with their tax dollars.
Libraries have a responsibility to ensure such challenges don’t overwhelm administrative capacity or interfere with others’ Freedom to Read.

☞ The New York State Department of Education achieved something rare this week: With a single regulatory amendment, it adopted a rule change that should make both diehard MAGA voters and No Kings liberals happy, along with one they’re (as per usual) deeply divided on.

I’m talking about the NEW REQUIREMENTS FOR PERSONAL FINANCE AND CLIMATE EDUCATION adopted this week. People across the political spectrum see financial education as beneficial, while the main point of agreement on the climate change debate is that the world is ending, with liberals attributing that to climate change and conservatives pointing to liberals as the cause.

The requirements will be rolled out over several years to students from kindergarten through grade 12, starting next school year. The details about what will be included in these new subject areas aren’t yet clear.

☞ President Trump nominated Bradford Pentony Wilson to be the new national Archivist earlier this month. “Who cares,” you say? Well, consider that every kind of document, email, text message and cocktail napkin sketch created by federal agency employees in connection to public business is considered a federal record under the Federal Records Act. And THE ARCHIVIST IS IN CHARGE OF MANAGING FEDERAL RECORDS.

Record management expert Don Lueders pointed this out in a 2025 article in The Federalist, calling for the next Archivist to be someone with the deep technical knowledge required to put our national documentation house in order. According to Lueders, the record management tools our government agencies have now are so unusable that workers just haven’t been archiving documents properly for a long time.

That means records can get lost, destroyed, or not destroyed when they’re supposed to be, posing both privacy risks and problems for FOIA requests and historical record keeping.

Lueders warned in his article against nominating a “mild-mannered historian” with no technical background—which seems like a pretty dead-on description of Bradford Pentony Wilson. However estimable his accomplishments as a scholar may be, information technology expertise is not on his resume. Working as an archivist doesn’t seem to be either.