New York’s Ex-Cop Mayor-Elect Says Will ‘Revisit’ Vaccine Mandate in Wake of NYPD Walkout

A day after winning his mayoral election in New York City, former New York Police Department (NYPD) captain Eric Adams has said he’s considering negotiating with city workers who have so far refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine, as required by an order from Mayor Bill De Blasio.

Talking to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, Adams laid out some of his plans for the Big Apple after he’s inaugurated on January 1, 2022.

“The mask mandates we should keep in place,” Adams said, adding that “we need to revisit how we are going to address the vaccine mandates.”

On October 20, De Blasio ordered that 160,500 municipal employees, including everyone from police officers and firefighters to court clerks and sanitation workers, would have to get at least their first shot of a COVID-19 vaccine by October 29 or be docked pay. This replaced an earlier order that unvaccinated city workers would have to take weekly COVID-19 tests.

However, between the short deadline and the ongoing anti-vaccine movement in the United States, some of the city’s public unions pushed back. NYPD and FDNY employees staged protests and sick-outs demonstrating against the mandate.

A column in the New York Times published on October 29 about city workers’ vaccine hesitancy suggested it stemmed in part from a belief that the mandate was a shrewd political move and not done out of genuine concern for the health and well-being of city workers.

New York City Fire Department (FDNY) union members, municipal workers and others demonstrate during a protest against the city's COVID-19 vaccine mandates on Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York City, New York, U.S., October 28, 2021

© REUTERS / MIKE SEGAR

Still, by November 3, some 92% of city workers who fell under the mandate had complied with the order, up from 84% when it was given two weeks earlier, De Blasio told reporters.

Adams said Wednesday he didn’t want “to Monday-morning-quarterback the mayor, this is his time to be the man, he has to make the decisions,” but he nonetheless urged De Blasio to “sit down with the unions.”

“We can work this out,” he added, noting he’d spoken with some of the union leaders on Tuesday and they were open to negotiation.

Adams was an NYPD and New York City Transit Police officer for 22 years, retiring in 2006 amid scrutiny for publicly criticizing then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That same year, he was elected to a seat in the New York State Senate, representing parts of Brooklyn - a borough he later became president of in 2013.

As the US’ mass vaccination campaign slowed down going into the summer of 2021, employers and government officials began looking at mandates to compel people to get their shots. More recently, as the Delta variant has been found to pose a greater danger to children and vaccination ages have been lowered, school districts have begun weighing mandates for students, as well.

Some Republican figures have pushed back on the mandates, suggesting they are another form of government overreach and characterizing them as typical of socialist countries such as China. Ironically, China’s National Health Commission has explicitly banned vaccine mandates, saying they’re not effective at convincing people to get the jab.

According to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, an average of 1.2 million Americans are getting vaccinated daily, a significant uptick from the summer average of roughly 700,000 per day, but a shadow of the April peak of 4.5 million per day. More than 67% of the US population has gotten at least one shot and 58.2% have gotten both shots.