The largest city in the United States is finally ending its COVID vaccine mandate on Friday. The foot-dragging on display in New York has left many workers burdened with this requirement far longer than in other parts of the country, but Mayor Eric Adams appears to at last be ready to relinquish some of his emergency powers. But that doesn’t mean that relief will necessarily be on the way for the roughly 2,000 municipal workers who were given the boot because they refused to take the jabs. That group includes police officers, firefighters, teachers, and sanitation workers, among others. Adams made it clear that the fired workers will be “allowed” to reapply for their old jobs, but ruled out the possibility of back pay. (New York Post)

Mayor Eric Adams is dropping New York’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccine mandate for public employees — but the nearly 2,000 workers fired for refusing to get the jab won’t automatically get their jobs back.

“With more than 96 percent of city workers and more than 80 percent of New Yorkers having received their primary COVID-19 series and more tools readily available to keep us healthy, this is the right moment for this decision,” Adams said in a statement released Monday.

“I continue to urge every New Yorker to get vaccinated, get boosted, and take the necessary steps to protect themselves and those around them from COVID-19,” Adams said.

You might think that with all we’ve learned over the past year or so that the Mayor might consider offering an apology for how the pandemic was handled in his city. You would be incorrect. Not only is Adams not apologizing, he’s doubling down on the city’s COVID response and “encouraging” everyone to “get vaccinated, get boosted, and take the necessary steps to protect themselves.”

There are clearly too many people in positions of power who learned nothing from our experiences over the course of the pandemic. The largest school system in the country was shut down for ages, setting back an entire generation of children in immeasurable ways, while the “remote learning” systems that were established were dismal failures. Everyone, including the children, was forced to wear masks which leading doctors now inform us did virtually nothing. Everyone who wanted to keep their jobs was forced to take experimental vaccines which we later learned neither prevent you from catching COVID nor spreading it to others.

Now, even the President is calling an end to the “pandemic emergency.” Apparently, everyone is supposed to simply go about their business and pretend that none of this happened. And the Mayor of New York is clearly following the same game plan.

That’s simply not good enough. Not by a long shot. All of this actually did happen, even if it sounds like something out of the script for a bad dystopian movie. People’s lives were negatively impacted in more ways than we can count. The economy was intentionally imploded. The nation’s faith in our medical institutions and the government’s ability to administer related policies were completely shattered.

If we let these people dust off their hands and walk away without learning any lessons from the past three years, it could all happen again. And you can rest assured that another pandemic will come along sooner or later. What happens then? We’ve already seen what happens when presidents, governors and mayors get a taste of the unbridled authoritarian powers they are granted during declared states of emergency. All of these people need to be held accountable for this fiasco. Sadly, the ones generally responsible for such oversight were all in on the plan and they are unlikely to apologize or change their ways.