New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Friday defended the firing of city employees who refused to comply with the now-sunsetting COVID vaccine mandate, arguing that it “just wasn’t right” for them to decline to get the jab.
Appearing on Caribbean Power Jam Radio’s “The Reset Show,” Adams was asked about the fate of the nearly 2,000 public employees who lost their jobs due to the vaccine requirement. The mayor responded that they will have to reapply for those jobs “just like everyone else.”
“They can reapply for their jobs,” Adams told host J.R. Giddings, noting that most city employees ended up taking the vaccine despite initial unwillingness.
More than 96 percent of city workers and more than 80 percent of residents have been vaccinated against COVID, according to city hall, which cited the high vaccination rates as the reason for the jabs not being optional.
“If we didn’t have that vaccine and we didn’t have those mandates, we would have lost so many more lives,” Adams argued. “And so New York has stepped up. They said, ‘We don’t want to do it. I don’t want to get injected. I don’t want to do this. This is new.’ But they stepped up anyway.”
New Yorkers are known to have a resentment toward being ordered what to do, Adams noted, but their culture in the face of the pandemic has shifted away from the mindset of resisting controls to one of accepting government mandates.
