BUCK: You have New York City now deciding that the entire city workforce, which is vast… The NYPD alone is over 40,000. I worked for the NYPD for a period of time on a leave from the federal government, and here is what de Blasio is saying. Play 4.
DE BLASIO: It’s a mandate now for all city agencies, all city workers. It’s time for everyone to get vaccinated. Our public employees are gonna lead us out of the covid era. Look, what we did with our schools worked. Our schools are incredibly safe, and families needed to know their kids would be safe. Well, we all need to know we’ll be safe going forward. We gotta end the covid era.
BUCK: Clay, this is now at the point where they’re doing the things that six months ago, they said, “We can recognize why that’s too far. We can recognize why we won’t do that.” You have cities like Chicago — we’ll talk about that one specifically in a moment — cities like Seattle and Portland where they’re going to lose police officers.
And when you look at the level of epidemiological effect that, what, the last 10% of your officers or 15% of your officers gonna make in the grand scheme of covid versus what that means for safety and people on the streets, how can public officials think this is a good idea? They’re gonna fire cops, Clay. They’re going to do it.
CLAY: The “defund the police” was the dumbest political argument of the twenty-first century. Intentionally firing police over a vaccine requirement that doesn’t take into account natural immunity, that doesn’t take into account religious or health related exemptions, my hope is — and I keep tossing this out there because I want more and more people to climb aboard this train.
As idiotic as I think vaccine mandates are and as much as I want them to be fought, I believe that what should exist is exemptions. We’ve started to see Southwest Airlines, Delta — as they have got 90% or so of their overall workforces vaccinated — granting leniently to that final 10% who may be strongly opposed, who may have natural immunity. They may have all different sorts of reasons why they don’t want to accede to the demand. Creating a substantial exemption, to me, feels like what a smart company should do, what a smart city should do, what a smart state should do.