Dr. Colin “Coke” McCord, who as a surgeon, public health administrator and advocate helped draw attention to stark health disparities in Harlem and impoverished communities around the globe, and two decades ago successfully pushed to extend the city’s exception-riddled indoor smoking ban to include all bars and restaurants, has died at his home in Oxford, England, at 94. His death, which occurred March 11, was first reported Friday by the New York Times.
McCord, in a career that spanned decades and continents, was widely credited with making significant contributions in public and international health, including in Bangladesh, Mozambique and Tanzania, where he helped extend new technology, training and services to underserved populations. But he touched the lives of untold millions while serving in various medical roles in New York City, including as an assistant health commissioner in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. He helped champion the city’s Smoke-Free Air Act, enacted in 2003, which barred smoking in bars, restaurants and most workplaces.
There are hundreds of New Yorkers who are alive today in significant part because of the work that Dr. Coke McCord did.
Those restrictions and other anti-smoking measures, including higher cigarette taxes, were credited a decade later by the city with preventing 10,000 premature deaths. The impact doubtless exceeded that estimate, as countless municipalities across the nation and globe replicated the city’s smoking restrictions, at a time when just a handful of municipalities and states risked enacting such sweeping bans, fearing that doing so would hurt business.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, the city’s health commissioner from 2002-09, told Gothamist that McCord’s legacy extended far and wide. He first worked with McCord in 1990.
“During my time as health commissioner in New York City,” Frieden said, “he was the one who read a textbook of nutrition and said, ‘You know, artificial trans fat is really bad stuff. We should do something about it.’ And that led to New York City taking action (banning artificial trans fat from the food supply under Bloomberg). And now the world is well on its way to eliminating artificial trans fat from the entire global food supply, a measure that will save literally more than 15 million lives."
McCord was the first director of a community-wide program in the South Bronx to reduce teen and unintended pregnancy. He also collaborated with fellow surgeon, cancer expert and leading public health advocate Dr. Harold P. Freeman on a much-noticed The New England Journal of Medicine paper, “Excess Mortality in Harlem.” It showed that life expectancy for Black men in Harlem lagged even that for men in impoverished Bangladesh. The work served as justification for a host of steps to improve health outcomes and services in low-income communities.
“There are hundreds of New Yorkers who are alive today in significant part because of the work that Dr. Coke McCord did,” Frieden said. “And it's not just about New York City. There are women and children throughout Africa who are surviving and healthy because of the surgical initiatives that he implemented."
McCord received a long list of honors for his work abroad, stretching from rural India to Tanzania.
Dr. Oxiris Barbot, who from 2018 until 2020 served as the city’s commissioner of health and mental hygiene and was the first Latina woman to hold the position, said, “I always thought of (McCord) him as the elder statesman of the health department.”
She added: “He was good at keeping up with the literature and prompting us to act to reduce inequities.”
According to a notice on Legacy.com, a memorial will be held in New York City in May.
