In August 2022, NYC health commissioner Ashwin Vasan said we didn’t need the vax mandate anymore. So why’d he keep it ’til February 2023?

In the time period of Fall 2021 through the end of 2022, thousands of New York City municipal workers who were applauded during the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns were publicly insulted and smeared in daily press conferences, and threatened with having our jobs and incomes taken from us as part of the Citywide pressure campaign to take the experimental shot known as the Covid vaccine. When many of us refused, we were terminated without due process. We were also set up in such a way that we would be collectively barred from getting Unemployment benefits. Two consecutive NYC Health Commissioners, Dave A. Chokshi and his successor Ashwin Vasan, gave this total deprivation of income the green light, though both, given their field of knowledge, would have known that exacting a total deprivation of income on employees and our families would provoke a cascade of negative public health consequences including inability to pay our housing and food (and that of our families), homelessness, anxiety, stress, social isolation, depression, illness, and possibly suicide. “Termination” emails at some agencies were sent out from no-reply addresses like “DHR@schools.nyc.gov” and other Kafkaesque, unaccountable addresses, signed by no one. Both Health Commissioners would have also been well aware of the potential negative mental health effects on thousands of workers of a “Termination” notice that had no way to reply and with due process withdrawn; yet they seemingly greenlighted this method of announcing “termination,” too.

The Covid-19 vaccine mandate was in place until February 2023, long enough to destroy the careers of thousands of NYC’s most experienced and dedicated workers. Such a policy, given its potentially serious social and economic consequences across neighborhoods and families, would be a policy that these Health Commissioners would know would require great caution and restraint in implementing and, if the vaccine mandate labor lockouts were to be used at all–which I contend it did not need to be–surely the Health Commissioner, who by March 2022 was Ashwin Vasan, would get rid of this severely restrictive policy the very minute that he concluded that the policy was not needed for the public health anymore.

Yet that did not happen, and what occurred on August 11, 2022, was very strange. Because Health Commissioner Vasan was interviewed that day. In that interview, he commented that the vaccine mandate was “right and appropriate” for the emergency part of Covid-19, but that we weren’t “in an emergency anymore.” He said emergency measures were no longer needed in NYC. This, he said, was because the infection numbers and other data showed that Covid-19 infections were decreasing. He said that the measures “like masks and vaccines” “had worked.”

Commissioner Vasan ended the interview. The Washington Post put it online. Vasan did not get rid of the vaccine mandate that day. Nor the next. In fact, he never made the comment again, and the mandate grinded on, prolonging the misery of ousted City workers. Strangely, though it was a monumentally important statement from our Health Commissioner, it got no subsequent press coverage. I did not even discover the interview until 2024, while doing some research. It is as if it had never happened.

As everyone knows, Vasan did not “end” the vaccine mandate until February 2023.

Since we know that on August 11, 2022, Vasan’s expert medical opinion was that the vaccine mandate was not needed anymore, we also know that he went against his own expert medical and public health opinion, which was his one responsibility to share honestly, promptly, and objectively to protect and guide eight million New Yorkers. Yet he did not do it.

Something, or more likely “someone” told Commissioner Vasan to keep the vaccine mandate in place after that interview. Since it was not a decision grounded in public health, some other concern, political perhaps, resulted in Commissioner Vasan going against his own public health expertise that he presumably had trained form decades to obtain. We New Yorkers have never been told who it was that made him walk back his statement, or rather, comply with burying it. But the fact that these former health commissioners are now teaching public health courses such as, “The Political Determinants of Public Health,” as if to legitimize the idea that politics should ever have a role in shaping public health policy, is deeply disturbing.

NYC’s unvaccinated workers are still being blocked from being reinstated and compensated, despite it being a full two years since “the end” of the vaccine mandate. Neither of these former Health Commissioners has called for us to be returned to work, even though there is no medical nor public health reason to not have everyone return, and even though neither should still be intimidated by any “political” determinants of health policy, as they may possibly have been while in City service.

The full interview is at the bottom of this post, and a link to the short clip of the above mentioned comments is also included, so that people may consider his comments themselves. Please consider sharing this post on social media with your local, state, and federal representatives, and calling for an explanation.