NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — New York City will require public hospital and health clinic staffers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 — or get tested for the virus every week, Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed Wednesday.
The mayor confirmed previous reports on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Wednesday morning and later at his daily briefing. He said the requirement will begin on Aug. 2 and impact all Health & Hospitals staff and clinical workers at the city Health Department.
"What we’re doing is mandating for the folks who work in our public hospitals and clinics. They need to be safe, the people they serve need to be safe. So we’re saying, 'Get vaccinated or get tested once every week,'" the mayor said on MSNBC.
“Every single one of those employees has a choice: get vaccinated, the better choice, or get tested weekly,” de Blasio said during his briefing. “At any point, you can decide, ‘Hey, I’m ready to get vaccinated, then you don’t need to get tested weekly anymore.”
The order will cover the roughly 42,000 people who work in the city's public hospital system, which includes 11 hospitals as well as nursing homes and clinics.
De Blasio called the move, which stops short of mandatory vaccines, a "very fair choice" for health care workers.
"I think what’s going to happen, a lot of folks are going to say, 'Okay, now it’s time to get vaccinated.' A lot of folks have been ready. We know this. A lot of folks have been, yeah, hesitant but still ready," de Blasio said. "And now it’s going to be that moment. Or after they get tested for a while, they might say, 'You know what, it might be just easier to go get vaccinated.'"
District Council 37, a union that represents hospital workers, released a statement, saying it “supports and has been encouraging of more testing.”
“Of course with all things, we’ll need to see how the testing is being implemented, but our primary concern is the safety of our members and their patients and testing gets to that,” union spokesperson Freddi Goldstein said.
The push for more vaccinations comes amid a new wave of COVID-19 cases fueled by the Delta variant, which now makes up about 7 in 10 cases sequenced in the city.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.