By Benyamin Davidsons
New York City’s Republican mayoral candidate, Curtis Sliwa, and local republicans assembled to protest Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandate for city employees and indoor venues. At a Manhattan rally on Sunday, which including some 300 people, Sliwa called for “freedom”. “Let people have individual rights and freedom — and not the boot, crushing the life out of our economic system, your ability to raise your families,” Sliwa said at the rally, being held a block away from Grace Mansion.
As reported by the NY Post, The Guardian Angels founder said he supported increasing the city’s vaccination rate but claims that the city’s recent mandates overstep, trampling individual freedom. “I think we can all agree here we’d like to see people vaccinated if they want to get vaccinated. Make it available,” Sliwa said. “The mandates are specifically meant to keep people like de Blasio in power, the City Council in power, so that they can dictate what we do in our lives and also for our children,” he boomed. He added that the September 13 mandates will be impossible to enforce. Referring to Mayor de Blasio, he said, “comrade Bill de Blasio, the part-time mayor, the dope from Park Slope,” is pushing his requirement “with no explanations of how he’s going to enforce it,” Sliwa said. He reprimanded Mayor de Blasio for “imposing the first mandate in America”. He also mentioned that he was looking forward to helping out the cats and dogs in NYC, and transforming the city’s pounds into no-kill shelters.
In a different gathering, earlier this month, Sliwa had boomed, “ We stand in unity against these mandates…We are not France! We are not Italy, We are America! Where we are free, Where we have choice.”
Seen at Sunday’s rally were dignitaries including Andrea Catsimatid, head of the Manhattan Republican Party, and Andrew Giuliani, the son of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a Republican candidate for governor.
To date, roughly 61.8 percent of all New Yorkers have received at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccination— including 73.6 percent of all adults. De Blasio’s new mandates were introduced in response to contagious Delta variant of COVID-19, which has led to outbreaks in many Southern states which have lower vaccination rates. In New York, the unvaccinated population has made up 495,023 of the 500,302 coronavirus cases in NYC between Jan. 1 and June 15, as per Yale University and the city Department of Health.
