The very short answers to two questions posed to New York Mayor Eric Adams this week when he announced the end of the city’s private employer vaccine mandate nicely encapsulate the logic and science — or, we should say, lack thereof — behind the policy, put in place by Bill de Blasio just as he was leaving office last December.
Question: Does the city have any numbers on the percentage of private businesses that got all their employees vaxxed and boosted?
Mayor Adams: No.
Question: There was no data collection there?
Mayor Adams: No.
And that’s the end of that, or it will be on Nov. 1. Indeed, why not end the rule immediately since nobody took it seriously, not even in government?
As we said from the get-go, this sweeping private-sector mandate was built on a shaky foundation, with no implementation plans whatsoever. An ambivalent Adams inherited it, then announced it was a mandate in name only before finally throwing in the towel.
Those upset about the city’s public employee mandate are pouncing to insist that New York now reverse course and let unvaccinated teachers, police, firefighters and others come back to work. Nonsense; employers have a well-established right to require their own workers to get the shots, provided in good faith they allow for religious and medical exemptions. It was very good public policy for New York to follow through on such an ultimatum, as it drove vaccination rates here high and saved lots of lives.
Assuming nothing fundamental changes about COVID variants’ response to vaccines, it makes sense to soon demand that city schoolchildren get their shots as a condition of enrollment. They already have to get vaccinated against a host of diseases with safe and effective vaccines, like measles, polio, hepatitis B and chickenpox. (Absent that universal rule for this academic year, we may as well let unvaccinated kids participate in sports and other extracurriculars.)
Despite Joe Biden’s wishes, the pandemic is not over. COVID still kills hundreds of Americans every day. Our best defense, vaccines, must remain fully deployed.
