how New York City businesses are responding to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s latest Covid-19 vaccine requirements ?
New York City is imposing a vaccine mandate for all private sector employers as a preemptive measure to fight a surge of Covid cases this winter, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday. The mandate covers 184,000 businesses and will go into effect on Dec. 27, and it doesn’t give unvaccinated employees the option to get tested regularly, de Blasio said. They must have at least one dose by that date. The policy applies to in-person employees who are in a workplace with other co-workers, de Blasio said during a news conference Monday. The city will publish guidelines on December 15 to provide more information on implementation and enforcement, de Blasio said.
The outgoing mayor said he has spoken with Mayor-elect Eric Adams about the policy. “We’ve got omicron as a new factor, we’ve got the colder weather, which is really going to create additional challenges with the delta variant, we’ve got holiday gatherings,” de Blasio told MSNBC earlier Monday morning. “We in New York City have decided to use a preemptive strike to really do something bold to stop the further growth of Covid and the dangers it’s causing to all of us.” The New York City policy comes after the Biden administration was forced to halt implementation and enforcement of national vaccine and testing requirements for businesses with 100 or more employees to comply with a federal court order.
“The commissioner of health has the authority to issue a mandate like this to protect the public health and his authority to do that has been upheld time and again,” Georgia Pestana, the city’s corporation counsel, said during the news conference with de Blasio.
“The trouble that the Biden administration has run into in court doesn’t really apply here.” The city will also require everyone 12 and older to show proof of two vaccine doses – as opposed to one dose under the prior policy – for indoor dining, fitness, entertainment and performance venues starting Dec. 27 unless they received Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine. Children ages 5 to 11 will be required to show proof of a single vaccine dose by Deсember 14 for those venues, the mayor said. They will also have to show proof of one dose for high-risk extracurricular activities such as sports, band, orchestra and dance by the same date.
De Blasio said the purpose of the vaccination requirements is to avoid the shutdowns imposed in March 2020 when Covid devastated New York City and its economy. “We cannot let those restrictions come back, we cannot have shutdowns here in New York City, we got to keep moving forward,” de Blasio during the news conference. “Vaccination works and vaccine mandates work, that’s the bottom line.” New York City already has a high rate of vaccination, with 77% of residents having received at least one dose, according to city data. New York has identified eight cases of the omicron variant as of the weekend, seven in the New York City area and one in Suffolk County on Long Island. “I’m sorry to say that you can expect community spread,” de Blasio said. “We have to assume it’s going to be widespread. We have to assume it’s going to give us a real challenge.” “We’ve been to this movie before, we’ve been down this road before. We know what happens when we get a new variant, particularly one that’s highly transmissible,” De Blasio said. “We are not going back to what happened in 2020,” he said….
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