Mamdani Distributes Chocolate Condoms to Fight Disease Outbreak

“Providing high-quality sexual and reproductive healthcare services is a priority for the Mamdani Administration,” explained NYC Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Helen Arteaga, an Ecuadorian immigrant who had been the CEO of a disastrous Queens city hospital where over a dozen patients had died of COVID in one day. “Making safer sex products more accessible to the most affected and vulnerable communities is a critical public health need.”

Councilwoman Pierina Sanchez, a Mamdani ally, explained that the free chocolate flavored condoms were necessary because “inequities persist among women, low-income households, and Black and Latino New Yorkers.”

The free condoms are coming from Karex, a Malaysian company operating under the ONE name in the United States which has been accused of slavery after workers claimed that there were no working toilets and poisonous snakes. That seems a lot more like real inequity than the people who claim to be victims getting free chocolate flavored condoms from the government.

But supplying chocolate flavored condoms to the “vulnerable” doesn’t seem to have helped.

Ahead of the World Cup and Pride Month, New York State’s Department of Health is warning about “a rise in sexual activity and sexually transmitted infections” and offering medications for anyone “with chlamydia, gonorrhea, and/or trichomoniasis to deliver to their sex partner” without the need for an actual doctor visit. And NYC hospitals are on alert for hemorrhagic fevers, RSV, tuberculosis, measles, varicella, hepatitis A, typhoid, malaria, SARS, hantavirus and Ebola, but for any foreign visitors bringing in diseases, that’s a little like sending coals to Newcastle.

Despite a massive public health infrastructure that got a huge shot of steroids during COVID, the city has become ground zero for disease outbreaks so much so that when the CDC recently provided an update on measles outbreaks in the country, New York City was listed separately from New York State: the only city in the country to receive this dubious honor.

And indeed, New York City is on its sixth case of measles so far this year, including one case in Manhattan by a person who had visited Mexico and then stopped by the Met to take in a performance of La Bohème about 19th century hipsters dying of tuberculosis

Speaking of TB, NYC’s Health Department had marked ‘World Tuberculosis Day’ by confessing to 743 cases in the city along with 10 of the most feared ‘drug resistant strains’ and blaming racism because “TB continued to disproportionately affect non-Hispanic black and Hispanic people”. But whose fault is that when Mamdani’s Health Department is run by Alister F. Martin, a Kamala advisor famous for creating Vot-ER to register patients visiting an ER to vote.

“Sorry Timmy, you’ve got TB. But now that you’re in the ER, let me register you to vote for my political party. The one on the bottom is your ‘Do Not Resuscitate After Election Day’ form.”

Then, lest anyone be concerned about how seriously the NYC Health Department was taking the TB outbreak, it promoted a TB conference that it was co-hosting in New Jersey, where attendees are less likely to get TB, featuring cast members from ‘Moulin Rouge! The Musical.’

Of course, Mamdani’s Health Department has its hands busy with all the diseases, of which measles and TB are just the tip of a very infectious iceberg. After a Legionnaire’s disease outbreak in city buildings in Harlem killed 5 people last year, several residents in Manhattan public housing came down with the disease this year. Residents in public housing were told to stop taking showers and fill up bathtubs very slowly as they try to figure out what’s causing it.

Health officials hadn’t gotten around to issuing this warning until the second person came down with the disease, but that’s a step up from last year when the source of the outbreak turned out to be the site of the New York City Public Health Laboratory: a ‘state of the art’ $454 million glass and steel tower whose bureaucrats would be “tasked with protecting and promoting the health of all New Yorkers and keeping the city at the forefront of disease response and investigation” which instead infected around 100 people with a disease.

New York City residents would have been healthier without blowing half a billion dollars on a new building to stay at the forefront of disease responses by infecting people with the diseases.

Much like firefighters starting fires, that is one way to stay at the forefront of disease responses.

What ought to have been a national news story and laughingstock stayed quietly local to avoid embarrassing the inept public health bureaucracy any further after the COVID years.

At least the Hepatitis A outbreak in NYC wasn’t caused by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, but by shellfish from NYC Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Helen Arteaga’s native Ecuador. The outbreak currently covers Brooklyn and Queens where Mamdani’s base lives and where people died in the hospital being run by Artega.

Still, in exciting disease news, New York City registered its first case of monkeypox or ‘Mpox Clade I’ (which sounds much more chic) shortly into Mamdani’s term in office as part of the 79 people in the city who have tested positive for monkeypox so far this year. Mpox Clade I is considered deadlier and only 20 cases have been recorded in the United States.

What were the odds that New York City would make the list?

NYC health city authorities are urging anyone who may “identify as male, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer or gender non-conforming” and plan to visit a monkeypox country and “anticipate sex with a new partner while traveling” to get vaccinated.

And if they get taken to an ER with monkeypox, they’ll be sure to get registered to vote. And whether or not they live long enough to vote, their vote will be counted. Over a dozen times.