Do you like your streets to be safe? If there’s a fire, do you want it to be put out? Do you like your garbage to be picked up? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you have some problems. That’s because the NYPD, FDNY and the New York City Sanitation Department are all severely understaffed because of Bill de Blasio.
At 5 p.m. on Friday, the de Blasio vaccine mandate went into effect. While many of the unvaccinated city workers got at least one dose before the deadline, at least 26,000 workers are staying home. This includes at least 8,000 police officers, 3,700 firefighters, and 2,000 sanitation workers.
On Saturday, a fire in a Washington Heights home had to be answered by a farther station because the local firehouse was one of the 26 shuttered houses. The FDNY has asked firefighters to remain on their shifts until replacements can be found.
NBC News reported missed trash pickups in Staten Island and Brooklyn, causing pileups. Anyone who’s lived in the city long enough knows that piled-up trash doesn’t just bring bad smells, but increased rodent infestation, which spreads diseases.
The city streets are also seeing fewer beat officers walking them. The NYPD asked over 700 officers to leave their current posts to walk the streets, leaving those assignments unfilled, just to ensure some local safety.
For 20 months, the employees of the city of New York interacted with the public without a vaccine mandate. More than half that time, there wasn’t even a vaccine. Not only were they not vilified, but the first responders and emergency workers in the city were hailed as heroes for being some of the only people in our society who never worked remotely. They always put themselves last in the name of public safety.
This vaccine mandate was too much, though. As everyone knows, coronavirus in not like other diseases. The danger is not equally distributed among all age groups and health statuses. The older you are, the more danger there is. The more comorbidities you have, the more danger there is. Members of the NYPD, FDNY, and Sanitation Department usually skew younger and healthier than the average person. While there is a risk to being unvaccinated, that may be a risk they are willing to take.
There also is the fact that natural immunity is, by all scientific data that has been collected so far, more effective than the vaccine at preventing getting or spreading COVID. And in the statistically improbable case that there is a second case of COVID, the symptoms are few to none. There was no opt-out clause in the vaccine mandate for those with natural immunity.
On top of that, it is immoral to have a vaccine mandate. It is a violation of your own health rights. No, it is not an issue of public safety - that has been scientifically proven. Studies in Israel and the United Kingdom, which both had the Delta variant before the United States did, show that vaccinated and unvaccinated people spread COVID at the same rate within a household. It does not matter if the firefighter responding to your home is vaccinated or not in terms of you getting COVID. The only thing you can do is protect yourself by getting the vaccine and hope that if you get a breakthrough infection, the vaccine will minimize the symptoms (as it is scientifically likely to do).
There’s also the morality of making people less safe to score a political point. There’s no scientific data that proves that NYPD, FDNY, or anyone else are vectors of transmission. De Blasio, and other Democrats, just want to show people that they are “doing something.” But all they are doing is destroying their cities and harming their citizens.
This is not a choice of a vaccinated or unvaccinated police officer responding to your 911 call. The choice is unvaccinated or no officer responding at all. Is that the city you want to live in? If not, put pressure on the Mayor’s office to rescind this mandate.
Moshe Hill is a political columnist and Senior Fellow at Amariah, an America First Zionist organization. Moshe has a weekly column in the Queens Jewish Link, and has been published in Daily Wire, CNS News, and other outlets. You can follow Moshe on his blog www.aHillwithaView.com, facebook.com/aHillwithaView, and twitter.com/HillWithView.