Mayor Mandates Vaccination for City’s Healthcare Workers

By Yehudit Garmaise  

     Despite the city’s best efforts to make vaccination as easy and accessible as possible to everyone in New York City, 30% of the population has chosen not to get their shots.     

      When questioned about the segment of the population that refuses vaccination at this point, Mayor Bill Blasio hinted this morning that he “is looking at a range of options.” 

   Although a more detailed announcement is expected tomorrow morning, this afternoon, the mayor said that he will soon require the city’s public hospital and health clinic systems’ employees, who curiously, have shown lower-than-average rates of vaccination, to get their shots.

     Healthcare workers who continue to refuse will have to submit to weekly testing for COVID-19, the mayor’s office confirmed with BoroPark24.

     Although the mayor paid heed this morning to the 4.9 million, or 60% or New Yorkers “who have come forward and gotten at least one dose,” to which he attributed to the city’s almost negligible hospital rate, when a reporter pointed out that City Councilman Mark Levine had proposed mandating vaccinations for people who work in high-risk settings, the mayor focused in on the source of his frustration with those who refuse vaccination.

      “This is literally a matter of life and death,” said Mayor de Blasio. “We could fix this problem. With the ability we have now as a city, in a matter of months, we could vaccinate everyone.”

      The insistence on universal vaccination by the mayor and his top physicians comes as the city and the entire country try to prevent a COVID resurgence stemmed by the Delta variant, which although it is much more contagious than previous strains of the virus, its effects are minimal for those who have been fully vaccinated.

     “The problem is misinformation [about vaccination] and the fact that people are buying into it,” the mayor said. “At a certain point: personal responsibility actually matters.

     "So, we've been really nice, really communicative, really respectful.

    "Come on, people: It's time to step forward, and we're going to make that real clear.”

     The vaccine is the closest thing that we have to a knockout punch,” said New York City Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi, MD.

     “We've got to be blunt about it," the mayor said. "If you're not getting vaccinated, you're actually causing harm to other people."

 Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.