Mayor Adams to Decide if City Should Mandate Booster Shots for Employees

By: Hellen Zaboulani

Newly-minted New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, will have to get right down to business, with COVID-19 swarming for his attention. New cases of the Omicron variant have spread rampant throughout the city.

As reported by the NY Post, on Sunday, Mayor Adams said his “next move” will be deciding whether booster shots should be mandated for municipal employees. “That’s our next move, a decision,” he said on ABC’s ‘This Week with George Stephanopoulos’. “We’re going to examine the numbers. If we feel we have to get to a place of making that mandatory, we want to do that.”

Since November, City employees have been mandated to be vaccinated against COVID-19. But the Big Apple’s problems are nowhere near over. Led by the highly contagious Omicron variant, the virus has been running wild in New York City, with the latest daily figures released on Saturday showing 49,724 new confirmed cases on Friday. That number represented over half the total statewide, which was a record-breaking 85,476 cases.

Still this variant seems to be a lot milder, with hospitalizations at 4,326, a figure which is still “well above last winter’s peak,” tweeted Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. The city’s daily death toll was 33, as per state data. To show how fluid the situation is, by comparison, data released Friday showed the city recorded 43,985 new daily cases on Thursday and 3,925 hospitalizations, as per the state and Levine.

Last week, Adams already confirmed that the city will continue following former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine policies, with the new mayor issuing executive orders to continue the “Key to NYC” program, which requires proof of vaccination to enter many indoor venues. On Thursday, Adams revealed that he will keep de Blasio’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates for public- and private-sector employees.

Also on Thursday, Adams released a plan saying the city will “immediately study” if vaccine requirements should include mandatory booster doses. The study will also mull whether public-school students should be required to vaccinate for the next school year. On Sunday, Mayor Adams reprimanded the New Yorkers who have so far refused to get inoculated. “I say to those who are not vaccinated: Stop it. It’s time to get vaccinated. It’s time to have the booster shots. You endanger yourself, and you are endangering the public and your family as well.”

City data shows that as of late December, just 40 percent of eligible New Yorkers opted to get the booster. Overall, roughly 82 percent of NYC residents have received at least one dose of a coronavirus immunization— that’s about 93 percent of adults.