Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday that all employees of the City of New York will be required to be vaccinated by September, as the spread of Covid-19 ramps up and a disconcerting amount of city employees remain unvaccinated.
The order will require all 340,000 municipal employees to get the jab by Sept. 13 — the first day of school for public school students — or submit to weekly mandatory Covid testing.
“This is about our recovery, this is what we need to do to bring back New York,” the mayor said during a virtual press briefing.
City Hall announced last week that public health workers in the city’s Health and Hospital system would be subjected to a vaccine mandate and hinted that further mandates would be soon to come.
New York City has managed to vaccinate roughly 70% of the city population, with more than 9.8 million doses administered so far. Yet some public employees have proved more resistant to the vaccine, with only 43% of the NYPD vaccinated, and only 55% of the FDNY so far, despite their frontline status.
While the city’s infection rate hit an all-time low earlier in the summer as the vaccination rate increased, it has ticked upwards throughout July as the more infectious Delta Variant has become the dominant strain.