New York lawmakers, including Reps. Elise Sefanik and Claudia Tenney, are urging New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) to drop her administration’s vaccine mandate on healthcare workers, citing “disastrous staffing shortages,” which they said are affecting quality care in the Empire State.

The letter, addressed to the governor, points to staffing shortages reported across the state, sparking negative effects on the state’s healthcare system.

According to the letter, the vaccine mandate for healthcare workers forced 34,000 healthcare workers from their jobs and resulted in “severe financial distress for New York Hospitals and increased barriers to care for those in need.” 

The lawmakers pointed to recent data, showing thousands of job openings for nurses — 9,300, to be exact —  as of December 7, 2022. They also pointed to a survey that found 100 percent of hospitals reporting a nursing staffing shortage and 49 percent reporting “reducing and/or eliminating services to mitigate staffing challenges.” 

“The evidence is clear: the staffing shortage affecting New York’s healthcare sector is a crisis and must be addressed,” they wrote, demanding Hochul “immediately rescind the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers in New York.”

Sandra Lindsay, left, a nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, is inoculated with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine by Dr. Michelle Chester, Monday, Dec. 14, 2020, in the Queens borough of New York (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, Pool).

“Our communities and hospitals need your support, not your burdensome mandates, as they continue to operate under historic staffing shortages,” the lawmakers concluded. 

Signers included New York Reps. Stefanik, Tenney, Nick Langworthy, Anthony D’Esposito, and more. 

“Kathy Hochul must repeal her authoritarian COVID-19 mandate for healthcare workers, so Upstate New Yorkers can have the access the quality care they need,” Stefanik said in a statement, deeming the vaccine mandates “an attack on the personal freedoms of our frontline workers and have unnecessarily exacerbated the healthcare workforce shortage at New York hospitals and healthcare centers.”

“There should be no more reason our rural hospitals have to continue to suffer from another crisis of Kathy Hochul’s creation,” she added.

The state’s website currently details the “new regulation,” which now states that all healthcare facilities regulated by the state “must require personnel to receive a COVID-19 booster dose or supplemental dose as recommended by the CDC, on top of the primary series of a COVID-19 vaccine.”

Exemptions are few, as there is a medical exemption but no exemption for religious reasons. 

The website asserts that the regulation is “needed” based on “data,” which it claims demonstrates that a booster shot is “needed to maximize protection against the virus over time and against new variants.”

Notably, the vaccines and booster shots do not prevent one from contracting the virus, nor do they prevent transmission, despite misinformation initially spread by President Biden himself.