Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive trying to evict Kathy Hochul from the governor’s mansion, sat down this month with an advocate from an anti-vaccine group once chaired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and said a New York bill requiring kids to be vaccinated before summer camp “sounds un-American.” Hochul’s campaign and a member of Congress who represents Bushwick both pounced. Rep. Nydia Velázquez wrote that Blakeman “as he’s lost running for every office under the sun.”
Velázquez was being literal. Blakeman lost the 1998 race for state comptroller to Carl McCall by a wide margin, lost his own Nassau County Legislature seat in 1999, lost a 2010 Republican Senate primary, and lost a 2014 congressional race to Democrat Kathleen Rice by six points, according to his electoral record. He finally broke through in 2021 by unseating Nassau County Executive Laura Curran with 50.35 percent of the vote, and was reelected in 2025. Velázquez, whose 7th District covers Bushwick, Ridgewood and Sunnyside, pointed to that record: “His record on health care is not a secret,” she wrote in a June 5 op-ed in the Brooklyn Reader, “in no small part because at every turn, he’s called for gutting New Yorkers’ healthcare.”
In an interview that Michael Kane, director of advocacy for Children’s Health Defense, posted to his Substack, Blakeman cast doubt on vaccine mandates and singled out the summer camp bill, Gothamist reported on June 12. “Medical decisions, important decisions, need to be made between the physician and the patient,” Blakeman said, adding that “there has to be overwhelming scientific evidence if you’re going to say that everybody has to do the same thing and that evidence hasn’t been produced.” Children’s Health Defense is the organization Kennedy, now U.S. Health secretary, ran for years, and which has spread vaccine-autism misinformation. The bill Blakeman called un-American, A.3254, is sponsored by Bronx Democrat Jeffrey Dinowitz and would require children at New York camps to have the standard school-age immunizations.
A Crain’s New York report by Amanda D’Ambrosio, published June 4, first flagged that Blakeman “cast doubt on evidence supporting universal vaccine requirements.” Blakeman has been here before. Less than two weeks into his county executive term in 2021, he rallied in Albany with Republican legislators against the state’s COVID masking rules and signed executive orders that Democrats argued exceeded his authority, City and State reported in a profile of his turn toward the MAGA base.
Hochul has spent the spring building the opposite brand. On May 15 she signed two bills protecting vaccine access, telling New Yorkers that “when public health comes under attack by an anti-science administration, New York fights back,” per her own office. One law (A.10710) requires insurers to cover vaccines recommended by the state health commissioner, on top of those greenlit by the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices; the other (A.10711) strips ACIP references out of state law and lets pharmacists give COVID-19 shots to kids ages 2 to 18. With Kennedy’s federal health apparatus pulling back on childhood vaccine recommendations, Hochul wants New York’s commissioner, not Washington, deciding what gets covered.
Velázquez put it in dollars and people. She cast her vote for the Affordable Care Act as one of her proudest days in Congress, and wrote that she has voted against every Republican attempt to dismantle it, a law that now covers 2.3 million New Yorkers. Blakeman called for repealing the ACA when he ran for Senate in 2010 and for Congress in 2014, she wrote, and is now promising deeper Medicaid cuts and a state version of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency. Nearly 450,000 New Yorkers, she added, already face coverage loss from recent federal cuts.
Blakeman is the de facto Republican nominee only because the actual frontrunner walked away. Rep. Elise Stefanik, the presumed nominee, suspended her campaign in December, citing family priorities and a desire to avoid a protracted primary, after which Trump endorsed Blakeman on Truth Social with a “Complete and Total Endorsement,” Newsweek reported. New York’s primary is June 23. Blakeman’s own internal poll, run by McLaughlin and Associates in late March, put him 9 points behind Hochul among likely voters, City and State reported, and that was the optimistic number his campaign chose to release. The public Siena polls were uglier for him: Hochul led 47 to 34 in March and 49 to 33 in late April, a lead that grew to 16 points even as her own approval rating slipped. That is the candidate now picking a fight over vaccine science with an RFK-affiliated podcast, eight days before voters weigh in.
The newsletter that carried Velázquez’s attack, paid for by Friends for Kathy Hochul, also rounded up a week of incumbent wins. On May 31 Hochul signed a buffer-zone law creating a 50-foot protester-free perimeter around houses of worship, making harassment at a place of worship a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to 90 days in jail, JNS reported from the Met Council breakfast where she signed it. On June 2 she and Mayor Zohran Mamdani opened applications for free 2-K childcare for two-year-olds in districts 6, 10, 18, 23 and 27, about 2,000 seats in neighborhoods including East Brooklyn’s Canarsie, Brownsville and Ocean Hill, backed by a $1.2 billion state investment in child care across New York City, ABC7 reported. Applications close June 26.
The newsletter also touted Hochul’s school phone ban, citing an educator survey in which 80 percent said the policy delivered positive results, WKBW reported, and the New York Daily News editorial board called it a success to copy on June 2. One catch: the survey drew 585 responses from people who work in schools, the same people who enforce the ban, so it measures staff satisfaction, not student outcomes, and the newsletter did not spell out that methodology. Hochul also unveiled a $6 million NY Kicks Fund for community soccer, timed eight days before the FIFA World Cup kicked off June 11, amNewYork reported.
If you live in Bushwick, your representative in this fight is Velázquez, and the decision is closer than the November ballot: New York’s gubernatorial primary is June 23. What both campaigns are arguing is already on the books, in the two vaccine-access laws Hochul signed in May, which her office lays out bill by bill. Read what those laws do and decide for yourself whether requiring a measles shot before sleepaway camp is tyranny or just summer.
Featured image: U.S. House Office of Photography / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
