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.
