In New York City right now, 98% of people who are in the hospital with severe COVID-19 cases are unvaccinated. The extremely infectious delta variant is driving infection rates, which had been dropping promisingly, back up at a distressing rate. As this new phase of this pandemic develops, it is time to start requiring vaccination for some activities and jobs. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about it, and fast.
We can and must continue to scale up vaccine outreach, focusing especially on trusted messengers in communities that are skeptical of state health-care directives. But it’s naive to believe that we will get to the level of vaccination necessary to crush the pandemic without requirements.
This week Mayor de Blasio announced that public sector health workers, around 40% of whom are still unvaccinated, will be required to get a shot by September, or else get tested for COVID weekly. That’s a good start. San Francisco is going further, requiring all municipal employees to get vaccinated.
A logical next step for New York would be to require vaccination or weekly testing for other city jobs that interact with the public — police, firefighters, teachers and school staff, correction officers, homeless shelter workers, and yes, City Council members. (We learned this week that only 43% of NYPD officers are vaccinated. The department’s response? Produce two more videos encouraging officers to get their shots.)
In addition to city jobs, we should look at requirements for discretionary public activities, which has proved an effective impetus to drive up plateauing rates. After France announced that either a vaccine pass or a negative COVID test would be required to go to a movie, club or restaurant, 2.2 million people signed up for appointments in 48 hours. Italy is now doing so too. New York should consider similar requirements. Almost everything is streaming on Netflix anyway; to go to a theater, you should get vaccinated. The same goes for the massive public concerts the city is planning — as my colleague Councilman Mark Levine notes, this is a prime opportunity to strongly encourage vaccination.
We would need to do it in ways that truly protect people’s privacy — paper vaccine cards and continued universal, free access to vaccines. We would of course respect medical exemptions. We can maintain an option for regular testing as an alternative.
Requiring vaccines for certain higher-risk activities and jobs is already a public health norm. To go to school in New York State, there are seven or eight required vaccines. Adding requirements in certain settings for COVID immunization makes sense to do soon. New York City has the authority to do it, even with Emergency Use Authorization of the vaccines (all of which have now been deployed far more widely than most drugs that get final FDA approval).
I’m still wearing my mask in indoor public places as a fully vaccinated person, and I support a return to mask mandates for indoor public settings. We’ve seen evidence that the rate of transmission is alarmingly high, and requirements are good for setting norms that will ensure more protection for more vulnerable people than the current honor system.
But we know that mass vaccination is by far the most important step to ending the pandemic’s ongoing toll on our city, our economy and our communities.
There would be a backlash to requirements, I know. We’re so polarized, and we have so little social trust. Many people are distrustful of government, of experts, of the health-care system. That’s true in communities of color, including among Black New Yorkers, whom the systems have so often failed to treat with dignity and care. It’s true among many on the right as well. We should listen attentively to that distrust, engage in as many conversations as we can, and invest in trusted validators from those communities to do more public health outreach.
But there is a good reason too to be confident in the public health research and guidance which overwhelmingly shows that the COVID vaccines are extremely effective and pose very little risk.
An all carrots, no sticks approach to vaccination is clearly insufficient, and will lead to an even more inequitable pandemic toll.
Wouldn’t trust best be restored by crushing the virus, so we can really reopen safely? And wouldn’t it be badly weakened by a renewed death toll that follows the unequal lines of vaccination?
I take the work of protecting the civil liberties of New Yorkers seriously, but it’s pretty clear that our freedoms would be expanded, not contracted, if required vaccines and negative tests can help us crush the very real and dangerous risk of a new wave of the pandemic.
It’s time to start the conversation on vaccine requirements.
Lander is the Democratic nominee for city comptroller. He represents Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope and other neighborhoods in the City Council.