Lift the vax mandate for everyone, Mayor Adams
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Mayor Eric Adams might as well concede the obvious now, lift all vaccine mandates and look at rehiring the public workers let go for refusing to show they were jabbed.
Whatever purpose the rules served previously, the pandemic is over and there’s no defending the double standard after he exempted professional sports teams and star performers from the private-sector vaccination mandate.
“This is about putting New York City-based performers on a level playing field,” Adams said Thursday. But he’s about the only one who sees it that way, even if he did previously call the de Blasio mandate “unfair” because unjabbed visiting players, but not hometown ones, got to play in the city.
“I still feel Kyrie [Irving] and all players should get vaccinated. Nothing has changed,” Adams protests. But that’s true of all the little folks who decline the jab, too.
There’s no scientific justification for the mandate. We now know the vaccinated can get COVID, just milder cases — so “herd immunity” is an impossibility. Mandates do little to affect hospitalizations or deaths. Federal mandates for private employers have been rejected by the courts. Holding on is just pig-headed.
Some 1,400 city workers, including first responders who worked through the worst of the pandemic, got fired; still on the sidelines are unvaxxed concession workers like Elissa Embree, a food-services employee at Citi Field.
Sidelined FDNY firefighter Sophy Medina, on unpaid leave while seeking a religious exemption, cited sports stars getting passes “not based on their religion, not based on their belief system and not based on science.”
The mayor’s noted that mandates undermine the city’s recovery; this is basically the last. Kill it, keep trying to persuade the unvaxxed to get their jabs and put this mess behind us all.