NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio Announces New Vaccine Mandate For All City Workers, Eliminates Testing Option

The Gateway PunditOctober 20, 2021

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday announced a new vaccine mandate for all city workers.

All public workers (160,000 people) must be vaccinated against Covid – the testing option has been eliminated.

“The vaccine is what has allowed us to fight back against COVID and save tens of thousands of lives. And there’s still a lot of city employees who are not vaccinated,” Bill de Blasio told CNN Wednesday. “I want to protect them. I want to protect their families. I want to protect all the people that they come in contact within this city.”

“Law enforcement has borne the brunt of COVID. In this nation in the last two years, 460 law enforcement officers have been lost to COVID. We’ve got to protect them,” he added. “This vaccine mandate allows us to do that.”

This is going to be a disaster for New York City because only 55% of the city’s firefighters are vaccinated and only 68% of NYPD officers are vaccinated.

NBC New York reported:

New York City is expanding its COVID-19 vaccine mandate to all public employees with no test-out option, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday.

Deadlines are different for the NYPD and FDNY versus corrections officers, but the message is the same, according to the mayor’s office: Those who serve the community must take responsibility to protect the people within it and themselves.

Effective immediately, city employees will receive $500 in their paychecks if they get their first shot at a city-run vaccination site, according to the mayor’s office.

The new rules affect more than 160,000 workers (including police, firefighters and correctional officers), 70% of whom already had at least one shot. The NYPD’s largest union already warned it will take legal action to block the mandate, while the FDNY-Uniformed Firefighters Association plans a media briefing later Wednesday.

Nearly 45% of FDNY firefighters are unvaccinated, the union president said.