Bill de Blasio: 9,000 Unvaccinated City Workers on Unpaid Leave

Thousands of city workers remain on paid leave after refusing to succumb to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s (D) coronavirus mandate imposed on city workers, the mayor announced Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters nearly a week after the city worker vaccine mandate went into effect, de Blasio said about 92 percent of municipal workers are vaccinated. 

“And then we have a group of people. … Nine thousand are on leave without pay. Remember, the total workforce is about 380,000,” he said, suggesting the unvaccinated workers on unpaid leave have made a mistake by failing to succumb to his edicts.

“Those folks always have the opportunity to correct,” de Blasio said. “They always have the opportunity to say, ‘You know what? On second thought, I’d rather get vaccinated, come back to work.'”

“We saw a lot of that, obviously, at the Department of Education, for example. We saw, as I mentioned just since Monday morning–it’s, you know, it’s Wednesday morning now–since Monday morning, 2,600 more vaccinations from that group that was supposed to go into leave without pay,” he continued, adding that the bulk of the city workforce has “made the decision” to get vaccinated.

On Monday, de Blasio noted that 12,000 city workers are currently seeking either religious or medical exemptions from the vaccine mandate, but he suggested that most will ultimately be denied.

“I don’t want to prejudge except to say what we know from previous experience is that it was–  certainly looking at Department of Education, we got a lot of requests for exemption,” he said. “Relatively few were granted.”

In this Aug. 14, 2019, file photo, people wait in line to hear attorneys speak at a hearing challenging the constitutionality of the state legislature’s repeal of the religious exemption to vaccination outside the Albany County Courthouse in Albany, NY (AP Photo/Hans Pennink, File).

“So I think you’ll see a number of people ultimately find that the exemption is not approved, and then, they still have that chance to correct, get vaccinated, come back,” he added, again suggesting that unvaccinated people are making a grave mistake by refusing to get the shot.

This week, de Blasio also announced that 86.5 percent of New York City adults have received at least one vaccine dose, calling it “amazing.”

Enforcement of the city’s vaccine mandate comes weeks after the Democrat mayor claimed to prefer to “respect people’s intelligence” before forcing them to get the jab.