Resist De Blasio's Vaccine Passport
Brian Doherty | 8.4.2021 12:50 PM
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's announcement that he intends, by mayoral ukase, to make it illegal for someone without a city-approved proof of vaccination to work at or be customers of the city's gyms, entertainment venues, and indoor restaurants is a grotesquely unconstitutional tyranny, annihilating human liberty of movement, commerce, and association with a dangerously tenuous justification.
Even with de Blasio's dataless references to saving lives as the justification for this move, and the admission that it won't (yet) be extended to public transit, it is clearly a blatant attempt to harass and punish Americans who have not yet gone along with months of state and media pressure to get vaccinated, for whatever reason. That we know the vaccinated also can transmit the virus makes the purely punitive nature of his power grab all the more clear.
New York currently has 72 percent of its adult population vaccinated with at least one dose and, looking at the current rate of vaccination over the past month, is adding around 130,000 to that vaccinated number weekly—another 2 percent of the city's adult population per week. This means that by the time de Blasio begins enforcing this regulation about five weeks from now, the city would likely even absent this threat be at around 82 percent adults vaccinated.
