The NYPD is providing city Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan with security after a horde of anti-mask protesters showed up at his home this week to hurl death threats and other invectives at him and his family, the Daily News has learned.
The News spotted roughly two dozen protesters on Monday night outside Vasan’s house, where they gathered to rail against a decision made by the commissioner and Mayor Adams to keep a school mask mandate in place for kids younger than 5. The demonstrators chanted “unmask our kids,” and one of them wielded a giant “F–k Biden” flag.
An NYPD patrol car has been posted outside Vasan’s pad since then.
Adams told reporters at an unrelated news conference Wednesday morning that the anti-mask group went beyond peaceful protesting while outside Vasan’s residence.
“There’s a group traveling around the city banging on the doors of my health commissioner even though his children are inside, yelling and screaming, threatening his life,” Adams said.
The NYPD declined to comment, citing security concerns.
Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for Vasan, also declined to comment on the specifics of the commissioner’s security arrangements, but forcefully condemned people who harass public health officials.
“To promote public health, we welcome public debate. But harassment of someone’s family and home is out of bounds and wholly unacceptable,” Gallahue said. “This should not — and cannot — be tolerated.”
The hubbub at Vasan’s home comes on the heels of Daniela Jampel, a city Law Department attorney, being fired from her job after sneaking into a City Hall news conference Monday to rant at Adams about the toddler mask mandate.
At Wednesday’s event, Adams stressed that he “did not make the call” to fire Jampel, who has become a vocal member of a group of anti-mask parents.
“I did not know who she was,” Adams said, adding that the Law Department had already decided to terminate her before the Monday stunt due to social media posts in which she criticized her agency for defending the toddler mask rule in court, among other issues.
Jampel’s diatribe, meantime, didn’t bother him much, Adams said.
“It doesn’t bother me when people say names, call names at me. I’m an ex-cop, people have been calling me names for years, it doesn’t bother me,” he said. “But what she tweeted, sent out, it was inappropriate.”
Adams and Vasan said last month that the school mask requirement for kids younger than 5 would be lifted April 4 unless COVID-19 cases began to spike.
Since then, COVID infections have started ticking up due to the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant of the virus — and Vasan and Adams as a result announced Friday that kids younger than 5 must continue to wear masks in school for now.
Other public health experts have voiced solidarity with Vasan amid the unsettling pushback.
“It’s really horrifying how difficult it has become to have rational conversations about complex public health topics,” Jay Varma, former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top pandemic adviser, wrote on Twitter last week. “It’s particularly frustrating, because these issues have to be debated publicly since most often there is no ‘right’ answer, only least bad options.”
