NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) – The Big Apple fired 1,430 city employees this week for refusing to comply with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, with thousands more public jobs hanging in the balance.
Yahoo reported that the terminations include 36 workers with the police department, 25 with the fire department, and 914 working in public education. Most of the fired workers had gone without pay since November. Almost 10,000 more jobs are potentially on the chopping block, though appeals for exemptions for medical and religious reasons remain pending.
Vaccine mandates became a source of major contention for public employees under former Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio, and continue to be so under his successor, Eric Adams. But Adams has attempted to put a positive spin on the situation with his rhetoric, claiming “they’re not being terminated, they are quitting.”
“Our goal was always to vaccinate, not terminate, and city workers stepped up and met the goal placed before them,” the Democrat mayor says. “I’m grateful to all the city workers who continue to serve New Yorkers and ‘Get Stuff Done’ for the greatest city in the world.”
Many Americans continue to harbor serious reservations as to the COVID vaccines’ safety, stemming in large part from the rushed nature of their creation. The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative developed and released the shots in a tenth of the time vaccine development usually takes and a quarter of the time it took the previous record-holder, the mumps vaccine, yet their advocates have done little to address the concerns of the hesitant.
During a COVID-19 vaccine hearing held by Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin last month, attorney Thomas Renz presented medical billing data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showing that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, 487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
In a statement to left-wing “fact-checking” outlet PolitiFact, Defense Health Agency’s Armed Forces Surveillance Division spokesperson Peter Graves confirmed the existence of the records but claimed that a conveniently-timed “data corruption” glitch made the pre-2021 numbers appear far lower than the actual numbers of cases for those years, which PolitiFact took at face value.
Meanwhile, data indicates that widespread dissemination of the COVID vaccines has failed to end the pandemic. The federal government considers more than 214 million Americans (over 64% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet data from Johns Hopkins University reported in October shows that more Americans died of COVID-19 by that point in 2021 (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000). The Moderna vaccine has been available throughout all of 2021; the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson shots were made available in late February.