This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated April 1, 2022
Spring is upon us, which means we are days away from the start of baseball season. On March 24, Mayor Adams held a press conference at Citi Field, announcing a new exception to the city’s vaccine mandate for athletes and performers. Unvaccinated Brooklyn Nets star, Kyrie Irving, had received much attention for how the requirement had meant he could not play in home games, and it would have created the same issue for the Yankees with their home opener April 7 and the Mets on April 14.
Strictly with respect to New York sports teams, there was a logical breakdown in the mandate. Irving was precluded from playing or even sitting on the bench with the team in the Barclays Center because he is unvaccinated, but he could sit one row behind them as a spectator in the stands with 19,000 fans who neither needed to be vaccinated or wear masks and watch unvaccinated players from the visiting team who are allowed to play because they do not work for a New York City employer.
The reason this illogical situation existed is because of the poor way Adams began selectively removing requirements in February. Early that month, the mayor suspended vaccine requirements for indoor venues, such as restaurants, fitness centers, and entertainment spaces, such as sports arenas. The city employee mandate remained in effect, creating the dilemma for unvaccinated New York athletes.
Adams was clear that he believes that making a carve out for athletes is important for New York fans and because their teams generate millions for the city economy. So, millionaire sports stars now get one set of rules allowing them to work if unvaccinated, while service workers at the Barclays Center or Yankee Stadium, who have not received their shots, are out of luck.
“This simplistic view that most people are fatigued from the pandemic and that a few have totally had it, so that means we do nothing to address it anymore, is not dissimilar from what we have seen with climate change.”
Citation….
Whether you are for or against vaccine mandates, everyone can agree that this makes no sense. Adams created one problem when he first eased vaccine mandates in February and his way of correcting that has created a far greater problem.
The numbers are clear. Vaccines work at slowing the spread of COVID and drastically reducing serious health outcomes, and vaccine mandates ensure the highest possible rates of vaccination. The mandate for all city-based employees led to greater than 99.5 percent the city’s 330,000 municipal workers getting vaccinated by the February deadline.
Even though they represented less than one percent of all public employees, 1,430 were fired for failing to comply with the mandate. With Adams disastrous handling of mandates, including special exceptions for sports stars, the unions for firefighters and police officers are now moving ahead with legal challenges. The reason why the mandates were allowed under the law is because they were applied evenly, but Adams continued mishandling of the matter will almost certainly now lead to all mandates being struck down completely.
This has been, and will continue to be, a total and complete failure by Adams. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams criticized the mayor’s mishandling of the situation, but most elected officials have been silent. We certainly need to transition back to a new kind of normal and allow for some flexibility of choice, as some people will feel more comfortable with forgoing mitigation methods than others, but it seems that the powers-that-be have decided it is now a binary issue — that it is either all one extreme or the other – and that any COVID precautions create too much of a headache from a loud minority that wants to live as if we had never heard of COVID.
It is a failure of leadership and of imagination. This simplistic view that most people are fatigued from the pandemic and that a few have totally had it, so that means we do nothing to address it anymore, is not dissimilar from what we have seen with climate change. Yes, there is a small minority of people who deny it exists at all, but even most who want to put their head in the sand, still accept it is a real challenge, choosing to take the incorrect stance that we do not know if we have any effect on causing it and that there is nothing we can do to stop it.
