Vaccine mandates begin, legal challenges to follow
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The FDA approved Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, making the way for the announcement of a series of vaccine mandates and potential future legal challenges. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File
By Jacob Kaye
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration fully approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine Monday, making way for the announcement of a slew of vaccine mandates in New York and beyond.
Shortly after the long-awaited approval, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that all Department of Education employees, including teachers, will have to upload proof of at least one dose of the vaccine by Sept. 27, about two weeks after the first day students are expected to return in-person.
“Today, the New York City Department of Health will be issuing an order requiring all staff in the New York City public schools to be vaccinated,” de Blasio said. “This will require that all staff of every kind, principals, teachers, custodians, food service, you name it, needs to have at least one dose by September 27th – the entire staff by September 27th, at least one dose.”
“We've been waiting for this for a long time, to have the full approval of the vaccine,” he added. “We now have it. This helps us move forward and we're moving forward with our schools with this new vaccine mandate.”
De Blasio’s announcement came hours before the Department of Defense said it would require active duty service members to be vaccinated. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy also said his state’s employees would also be required to be vaccinated by mid-October or be subject to regular COVID-19 testing on Monday.
In the courts, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore said that with the “full approval to one or more of the COVID vaccines, many public and private employers have announced their intention to mandate the vaccination of their workforces, and now, after much discussion and deliberation, we intend to do the same."
The Unified Court System is currently rolling out a policy that would require all court staff and judges to be vaccinated or otherwise undergo regular testing. That policy is slated to go into effect on Sept. 7.
A spokesperson from the Office of Court Administration said that while a vaccine mandate “may be on the way,” there’s “nothing further” at the moment.
Carmelo Grimaldi, a Queens-raised labor attorney with Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone, said that he’s been working with clients who are looking to challenge de Blasio’s executive order passed last week, which requires patrons and employees of restaurants, fitness centers and entertainment businesses to be vaccinated.
Grimaldi said the executive order is more rigid about who is required to get the vaccine than other vaccine mandates.
“Unlike other vaccination laws, there really aren't any exemptions for people who have medical reasons to be exempt from the vaccination, and for people who have religious reasons to be exempt from the vaccination,” Grimaldi said. “It's a very tough pro-vaccination order.”
The attorney said that while he hasn’t yet had a chance to dive into de Blasio’s mandate to school employees, he expects there will quickly be legal challenges mounted, as has been the case with past vaccine related orders.
“I'm sure they'll challenge the teacher mandate and the courts will have to decide,” Grimaldi said.
With the fast moving policies around COVID-19 and the vaccines, attorneys have had a difficult time keeping up, he added.
“One thing that is hard for practitioners like me, is that these laws are coming in real fast and sometimes there are gaps in the way laws are explained,” Grimaldi said. “That's the reason why you often have litigation to decide what is this meant to mean?”
The federal approval of the vaccine and the mandates come as the Delta variant continues to infect a growing number of New Yorkers. Around 3.98 of COVID tests in the five boroughs came back positive on average in the past seven days, according to the city’s Department of Health. The Delta variant has accounted for 94 percent of tested cases in the past month, city data shows.
The court system has documented 119 positive COVID-19 cases throughout the first three weeks of August. There were 33 positive cases throughout the entire month of July.
