Things are about to get awful in the Big Apple.
Around the country, there are a number of organizations, businesses, and government entities who are struggling with the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
They aren’t losing employees or customers to the disease, (at least not in the way that they were a year ago), nor are they suffering from the previous, debilitating economic issues that we all battled in 2020.
No, this time around, it’s resistance to vaccine mandates that are threatening to gut some of the most essential services that our nation has.
The NYPD is doing everything in its power to convince cops to receive life-saving COVID vaccine shots as the city’s mandate deadline looms — a cutoff that could send a quarter of the police force home without pay.
“We have to prepare as if this is going to go into effect Friday evening and that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said on NY1 Tuesday. “We have vaccines available throughout the city for our members.”
Police say that 73% of the NYPD has gotten at least one vaccination shot. The number should increase ahead of the deadline, Shea said. City employees not vaccinated by Friday will be sent home without pay.
And it gets worse:
The NYPD is doing far better than the city Department of Sanitation, FDNY and Department of Correction, where vaccination rates are all below 63%. The Correction Department is faring the worst, with only 52% of its members vaccinated.
The news comes just weeks after the Seattle, Oregon police department reported a similar issue, with that force already having been understaffed on account of the city’s liberal policies regarding ongoing protests and riots in which officers felt largely abandoned by policy makers.
