New York City employees marched on City Hall on Monday in protest of a coming vaccine mandate, shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge as they waved American flags and vowed to leave their jobs rather than comply with the new requirement.
The crowd, which numbered in the thousands, included a large presence of police and firefighters, proudly displaying their stationhouses and precincts. A handful of on-duty paramedics also stopped to join the protest mid-shift.
“I’m here to cheer on my brothers and sisters against a forced mandate,” Nial O'Shaughnessy, a paramedic who covers Lower Manhattan, told WNYC/Gothamist.
Billed as a “March for Choice,” the event comes four days before all municipal employees will be required to take a vaccine, as part of a sweeping mandate announced last week by Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Those who don’t comply will be placed on unpaid leave starting November 1st until they get the shot. Employees who do get their first shot at a city-run site will receive $500.
A man in an NYPD shirt carrying a Gadsden flag
In addition to municipal workers, the demonstration drew a wide range of anti-mandate activists, including mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa and several right-wing personalities. Many participants seemed eager to commiserate over the personal and professional sacrifices they had endured for refusing to get the shot.
“I can't eat inside a restaurant. I can’t go into a museum. I was fired from my job. That is persecution,” said Daniel Atha, a former conservation program manager at the New York Botanical Garden. He said he left his job after 27 years when the company implemented a vaccine mandate for all employees last month.
“They’re taking away my human rights and treating me as a second class citizen all based on my medical status. That is wrong, that is tryanny, and that's exactly how the Holocaust started.”
Multiple independent fact-checkers show that there is no logical connection between the COVID-19 vaccines, the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Code.
“It shouldn’t need to be said, but there’s simply no comparison between mask mandates or vaccine requirements in the U.S. and what happened during the Holocaust," Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt said in a statement to Axios in August.
Atha was one of several attendees seen with a gold Star of David pinned to his lapel, evoking a connection between the vaccine requirement and the Nazi’s genocide of Jewish people.
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday blamed misinformation for the high turnout anti-mandate event. He noted that 85% of adults in New York City have received the shot, including thousands of health care workers and school employees who waited until the final days before their mandate took effect.
At the same time, Sanitation Commissioner Edward Grayson warned last week that the city could see some delays in service depending on the availability of the workforce. As of now, approximately 3,800 sanitation workers, or roughly 37%, had not received a shot.
“Monday I'm going to show up to work, and they're going to have to send me home, and that's it,” said Jonathan Vasquez, a 40-year-old sanitation worker. “We went from essential to expendable.”
Like many of those in attendance, Vasquez claimed the vaccine was rushed and not properly tested. In fact, the vaccines have undergone an unprecedented level of safety monitoring, are based on more than a decade of biomedical research and are considered safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration.
Hours after the anti-vaccine protest, the Police Benevolent Association filed a lawsuit to block the requirement, arguing that the city had offered "no explanation, much less a rational one, for the need to violate autonomy and privacy of NYPD officers in such a severe manner, on the threat of termination."
As of October 15th, the Fire Department had a 60% vaccination rate, while the NYPD was at 69%. The city agency with the lowest vaccination rate was the Department of Correction, with just half of employees having received the shot.
