Editorial: Vaccination nation: The path to wider adoption of vaccines runs through employers
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was moving in the right direction last week when he tried to coax city health employees to get COVID-19 vaccinations and beat back rising delta variant infections by requiring unvaccinated personnel to undergo weekly tests for the virus. Refusal will trigger unpaid suspensions. We called it weak medicine that didn’t go far enough, and on Monday he corrected himself, extending the same rule to every municipal worker, from cops to sanitmen to parkies. Also on Monday, California took essentially the same step.
The state of New York should follow suit, as should the feds. The goal isn’t to increase testing, but to ensure wider adoption of vaccines, which are the best tool we have to arrest the plague. Masking and tests have their uses, but only vaccines can win this war.
As we’ve learned the hard way with COVID-19, it moves very fast and days — nay, hours — matter. A five-day lag in the updated policy is not good, but delaying the full citywide implementation for six weeks is terrible. The health care workers start under the new reality on Aug. 2. It’s not until two weeks later that the mandate will cover staff in congregate and residential settings. Everyone else gets to wait until Sept. 13. Move that timetable up.
The unions claim that it’s a matter for bargaining. No it isn’t; it’s a matter of public health and life and death. Did their predecessors seek to negotiate the smallpox and polio vaccines?
De Blasio is also correct when he urges private employers to require vaccines of their workforce. Ideally, we would like all to present an ultimatum: “No Jab, No Job” — with medical exemptions, of course, and religious exemptions if necessary, though we don’t know any faith that prefers viral infection to viral protection.
We trust that the FDA will soon, we hope very soon, grant full authorization for the shots. But stronger steps to protect the public need not wait for that. If another wave is coming, we don’t have to sit here and take it.
