By Bob Hennelly

Citing a 96-percent compliance rate from the municipal workforce, the City of New York will no longer require civil servants to get the COVID vaccine Mayor Eric Adams announced today. The vax mandate resulted in the termination of 1,780 municipal workers and sparked multiple lawsuits which are ongoing.

In the announcement the city said the terminated workers would “not be able to automatically return to their previous positions, they will be able to apply for positions with their former agencies through existing city rules and regulations and hiring processes.”

A source at City Hall said that the Health+Hospitals municipal hospital network was still under New York State’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.

“City workers stepped up tremendously throughout the pandemic,” Mayor Adams said in a statement. “From our health care frontline workers and first responders who saved lives, to the city employees who kept our streets clean, our schools open, and our streets safe, we owe city workers a debt of gratitude for their service during New York City’s darkest days.”

Over 1.1 million Americans have died during the pandemic with close to 45,000 deaths in New York City. May 11th President Biden is expected to lift the national health emergency.

“It’s clear these mandates saved lives and were absolutely necessary to meet the moment. We’re grateful that we can now, as we leave the emergency phase of the pandemic, modify more of the rules that have gotten us to this point,” said New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan. “We cannot overstate our appreciation for the millions of New Yorkers who made the necessary sacrifices to keep our city safe and save lives.”

Dr. John P. Moore is a professor of microbiology and Immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is concerned about ending the vaccine mandate for first responders like members of the FDNY and NYPD who can in an instant be required to provide emergency first aid to the public. He notes that Mayor Adams’ action came after the Congress, acting “under political pressure,” rolled back the vaccine mandate for the military.

“There are cheap political points to be scored by the mayor,” Moore said. “But is it the right decision with the implications of people returning to work…who have this notion that everyone has to be individual and forget our collective responsibilities to society — if somebody doesn’t want to take a vaccine they don’t have to because they are the personal sovereign over their body which ignores that everybody is a member of a complex society."

The controversial vaccine mandate was imposed by Mayor de Blasio in October of 2021. It earned the ire of the city’s unions because the city opted to not sit down with the Municipal Labor Committee as it requested to negotiate a vaccine protocol as well as a process for granting religious and medical accommodations prior to making the vaccine mandatory.

The rescinding of the workplace requirement comes at a time when the city grapples with how to fill thousands of vacant jobs in a myriad of titles and the winning of some significant legal victories for fired city employees in court. At least 400 municipal civil servants died in the initial phases of the pandemic. And undetermined number have been sidelined by so-called long COVID 19 symptoms which can be debilitating. 

"Vaccines and boosters are the best way to keep ourselves and our school communities safe,” the UFT said in a statement. “This change in policy applies the same rules for municipal workers that have already been in effect for private sector employees in New York City. We are working with the DOE to ensure the policy change is implemented in accordance with our contract."

“It’s very encouraging to hear that the New York City vaccine mandate is finally coming to an end, but a lot of questions still remain as to what will happen with members of the FDNY who were fired — we believe that they will be able to come back to work. We will have to hammer this out,” Andy Ansbro, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association said during a phone interview. “There’s also a lot of issues related to the collective bargaining violations that were put on us. We believe our members are owed back pay who were put out of work illegally. We may still be in a position where we continue our lawsuits for our members to seek back wages.”

Ansbro said close to 20 firefighters were terminated, “but we also had many members who chose to resign and if you resign there are rules, and you may not have the option to come back, but we will be fighting for them to have that option.”

Under current law, applicants to the FDNY must be under 29 years old before they start the application process.

“Certainly, for those of our people who have their reasonable accommodations still pending they are relieved they don’t have that guillotine over their head that they would be fired or have to retire,” said Lt. James McCarthy, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. “But there are members that were forced to retire since Nov. 1 of 2021 because they didn’t want to get vaccinated, and our lawsuits are going to have to continue over the violations of collective bargaining—discipline imposed without a hearing authority and people being put on leave without back pay.”

“We are glad that the City has decided to stop fighting against our court victory overturning this unjust and illogical mandate,” said PBA President Pat Lynch in a statement. “However, the job is only half done. We call on the City to ensure that our members who were fired or had their employment unfairly impacted are reinstated, with back pay and without condition.”

As part of the rollback, beginning February 10, visitors to Department of Education (DOE) school buildings will no longer be required to provide proof of at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. “This will allow students’ families and loved ones to attend school activities, celebrations, and events,” according to the city’s press release.

The New York Times reports that COVID conditions are improving across the country, with reported cases and hospitalizations both falling by more than 20 percent nationally over the last two weeks. Just over 30,000 people are hospitalized, down from 50,000 last month. But test positivity has begun to increase again and if that trend is sustained, we could see both cases and hospitalizations on the rise again. The country is still seeing well over 400 deaths a day from COVID.

The City Council’s Common-Sense Caucus, which is composed of eight members from both political parties, issued a statement saying, “This news will come as an incredible relief to thousands of city workers and their families, and the parents and guardians who have been barred from attending their children’s public-school events. There is more to be done for those workers who were unjustly fired for making personal medical choices, but this is a tremendous step toward righting the wrongs of the previous administration’s misguided pandemic policies.”

Caucus members also added, “During our numerous conversations with this administration and with Mayor Adams himself about ending the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates, we have always asked that they consider the undue harm of these policies and that, ultimately, they follow the science. Today’s announcement that the city will be rescinding the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all city employees and for visitors to public schools proves they have done just that.”

Many occupational and public health questions remain about COVID.

“The broader public health, social, and economic effects of long COVID are unclear,” the U.S. General Accountability Office [GAO] reported last year. “Studies in the U.S. estimate that 10 to 30-percent of COVID-19 survivors develop long COVID. If so, 7.7 million to 23 million people in the U.S. may have developed long COVID as of February 2022. In January 2022, the Brookings Institution conducted a meta-analysis to suggest that long COVID may be responsible for over 1 million workers being out of the labor force at any given time.”