Over 10% of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's workforce is unvaccinated against COVID-19 or hasn't shared their vaccination status, and the agency's head fears significant service disruptions as soon as the end of this month.
Director of Transportation Jeffrey Tumlin told the Board of Directors during Tuesday afternoon's meeting that 640 employees hadn't provided their status or been vaccinated as of Sept. 30, over half of whom are transit operators. Starting Nov. 1, full vaccination against COVID-19 becomes a condition of employment for the City of San Francisco.
That means city employees will need to have received their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, or their single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine no later than Oct. 18. Otherwise, they could be fired.
"Our agency could lose over 300 operators, roughly the equivalent of the total number of operators we are expected to train and hire over the next 18 months," Tumlin said, reiterating the findings submitted last week in a report to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
"This adds 18 months to our timeline for restoring 100% of Muni’s pre-pandemic service levels," he added.
Tumlin said the agency has begun to "warn city leadership" that it will have difficulty providing "full service" on Halloween weekend, with the vaccination deadline falling a day later and Outside Lands also returning to Golden Gate Park on Oct. 29-31. The agency currently can’t fill its overtime slots, according to Tumlin, who said he expects "service will be significantly worse" that weekend.
Depending on how many transit operators remain unvaccinated at the beginning next month, "chaotic service reductions" could follow in November.
"We very much hope this situation will improve over the next month," Tumlin said of the agency's unvaccinated staff. "But as we hope and work for a better outcome, we are simultaneously planning for the worst."
Nineteen percent of the city's parking control officers are unvaccinated or haven’t reported their status, and Tumlin said the agency would have to "fully or partly suspend" enforcement of abandoned vehicles, disabled parking placards, residential parking permits and some metered parking. As many as four schools could lose their crossing guards, and eight stand to have fewer.
Fewer than 50 SFMTA workers had requested medical or religious exemptions, and Tumlin said it was his impression "fear" and "disinformation" were the primary causes of vaccine hesitancy among employees. Mobile vaccination clinics didn't significantly improve vaccination rates, while the agency will bring in Dr. Ayanna Bennett, the city's chief health equity officer, to answer questions about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
"What we're finding, quite clearly, is that it is not lack of access to the vaccine that’s the problem," Tumlin said. "It is actually vaccine hesitancy, and much of that seems to be rooted in the prevailing misinformation that we have seen everywhere in the media."
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