COVID vaccination rates spike among NYC police, firefighters as mandate sets in
Global News
The dispute is the latest to erupt in New York City as vaccine mandates have been increasingly imposed nationwide to help stem the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.
A rush of eleventh-hour inoculations sharply reduced the number of New York City emergency responders who failed to meet the city’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement as it began to be enforced on Monday, officials said.
The vaccination rate for all city employees, including police officers and firefighters, rose to 91 per cent from 86 per cent late last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio said over the weekend on Twitter.
De Blasio on Oct. 20 ordered the city’s 50,000 uniformed services workers, including emergency medical and sanitation employees, to have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine by late Friday afternoon.
Enforcement of the mandate in the city of 8.8 million people was set to start on Monday, with de Blasio saying that employees reporting for duty who had failed to get immunized would not be paid.
Union officials, who said last week at least one-third of firefighters and police officers were unvaccinated, predicted worker shortages as a result of the mandate, which eliminated a COVID testing alternative that they said had worked well.
At a pre-dawn briefing, Uniformed Firefighters Association President Andrew Ansbro predicted that dozens of fire companies would be forced to shut down, and urged the city to give his members more time to comply, NY1 TV reported.
But Ansbro added, “This is not a city in crisis.”
De Blasio, a Democrat, who had predicted a last-minute vaccination surge, said 2,300 workers were immunized on Saturday alone.
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