Photo Courtesy of the Office of the Mayor
Dr. David Chokshi
By Michael V. Cusenza
Jackson Heights resident David Chokshi, M.D., is the new commissioner of the City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday.
Hizzoner appointed Chokshi as the City’s latest top doc less than an hour after his predecessor, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, resigned her post after a stormy two-year tenure punctuated Tuesday by a resignation letter that took shots at de Blasio for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I leave my post today with deep disappointment that during the most critical public health crisis in our lifetime, that the Health Department’s incomparable disease control expertise was not used to the degree it could have been,” Barbot wrote.
According to the administration, Chokshi comes to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene with a wealth of experience in public health, clinical medicine, and health policy. Raised in Baton Rouge, he served at the Louisiana Department of Health before and after Hurricane Katrina, with a focus on reshaping the State’s healthcare system in the wake of the storm.
Chokshi served as a White House Fellow in the Obama administration and was the principal health advisor to the secretary of Veterans Affairs. In 2016, President Barack Obama appointed him to the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health.
De Blasio noted that Chokshi will continue his clinical practice at Bellevue Hospital, where he has been a primary care physician since 2014. He trained at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School.
