De Blasio Brushes Off Concerns Of 6K NYPD Vaccine Exemptions

New York City NY

15 November, 2021

3:39 PM

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NEW YORK CITY — More than 6,000 unvaccinated NYPD employees remain on the job awaiting word on their medical or religious exemptions to a strict COVID-19 vaccine mandate, according to data. All told, the NYPD represents half of all 12,400 "reasonable accommodation" requests made by municipal workers now being reviewed by officials. Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday brushed off concerns that those officers, if their requests are rejected en masse, would create a staffing shortfall for the city's most prominent public safety agency. "I expect all of those to be adjudicated in the next weeks," he said. "And then as we've seen with everybody else in city service, someone gets an accommodation — great, they can keep doing the work. Someone doesn't, they'll have a choice to make. "We can safely predict the vast majority will choose to get vaccinated at that point." City workers have largely complied to de Blasio's vaccine-or-no-pay mandate. Roughly 93 percent of all municipal workers are vaccinated and agencies that were once holdouts have seen inoculation rates increase. The NYPD and FDNY are two such departments, and their vaccination rates now stand at 86 percent each, de Blasio said. But the reasonable accommodation requests could create a slight wrinkle in the city's effort to get workers vaccinated. Combined, 7,730 police officers and firefighters are unvaccinated and still submitting to regular COVID-19 tests to stay on the job, according to data.