NYC mayor-elect wants to ‘revisit’ vaccine mandate

New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams says he wants to “revisit” the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for city workers, which has drawn resistance from some unions.

“We need to revisit how we’re going to address the vaccine mandates,” Adams said on MSNBC on Wednesday.

While saying he did not want to “Monday morning quarterback” current Mayor Bill de Blasio, who put the mandate for city workers into effect, Adams said, “what I’m going to encourage him to do is to sit down with the unions.”

“We can work this out,” Adams added. “This is a very difficult moment, but there’s an opportunity to sit down with the unions. I communicated with some of the union leaders yesterday and they are open to sit down, and this is a good opportunity to do so and I’m going to encourage him to make that happen.”

De Blasio has defended the mandate, saying that it has helped raise the vaccination rate among city workers, after voluntary measures reached their limits.

“We tried voluntary approaches,” de Blasio said Tuesday on CNN. “We tried incentives. It wasn’t moving enough. Since we put this mandate into place Oct. 20, 24,000 more city employees have gotten vaccinated in just about 10 days. So, there’s the proof in the pudding.”

He said the city workforce’s vaccination rate is now at 92 percent.

Some of the most pushback has come from police officers and firefighters.

De Blasio expressed concern that some firefighters were calling in sick in a “sickout” in protest of the mandate.

“If you’re not sick, get to work; protect your fellow New Yorkers, be there for your fellow firefighters, stop playing this game,” de Blasio said.