Mayor Eric Adams announced earlier this week that COVID-19 vaccinations for all city workers will become optional starting Friday.
This announcement comes after a year after the city fired more than 1,700 city workers for refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate.
City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan said the decision was made as New York City moves out of the emergency phase of the pandemic. However, not all health officials agree with the city’s move.
Dr. Jay Varma, director of the Center for Pandemic Prevention and Response at Weill Cornell Medicine and former senior adviser for public health to former Mayor Bill de Blasio, joined Errol Louis on “Inside City Hall” Wednesday to discuss why he disagrees with the current mayor’s decision.
When the announcement was made Monday, Varma wrote he was “shocked” by the move.
He said Wednesday one of the ways to keep people alive and the health system functioning is by having a high percentage of adults in the city vaccinated.
“That was really one of the main reasons why, you know, we implemented that mandate. And my concern is that while there are a large number of city employees — pretty much all of them right now who are vaccinated — you know that number that doesn’t stay fixed,” he said.
Varma continued that if new people come into the system, over time the percentage of people who are vaccinated would go down and “that number is going to present a challenge.”
“This is a disease that will keep people out of work, and the more that you can prevent it, the more you can be at work,” he said.
The city dropped its vaccine mandate for private-sector workers this past November.
Varma said the city should impose the vaccine mandate first because it “lays out a marker.”
“It ends up being a standard by which private sector employees can then adhere to that,” he said, adding that he’s afraid that employers who currently have a mandate in place will follow the city.
According to Varma, human nature plays a role in why people are becoming less afraid of COVID-19.
“Because these are things you can’t see, they become less real to people,” he said. “And I fully accept the fact that a lot of people, including myself, are trying to get back to living a normal life. It turns out that if you look at all the things we have to extend human life for the last 50 years, vaccination is kind of at the top of the list.”
When asked how bad things have to get before New York may have to bring back some of the COVID-19 mandates and that vaccinations are still happening, Varma said “the pessimist in me says that we, as in the public health people, have lost this narrative.”
“It may have to be more similar to the flu vaccine where you have to do a lot of incentives, a lot of education and outreach, and hope that correct information wins out over bad information,” he continued.