NYC vows to fight for vaccine mandates: Analysis

On Tuesday, October 25th, a New York judge struck down New York City's vaccine mandate for city workers, calling it “arbitrary and capricious”. Multiple news outlets hurried to inform their readers that it was game, set, and match for the anti-mandate activists; very few reported that far from conceding defeat, NYC was determined to appeal.

The city strongly disagrees with this ruling as the mandate is firmly grounded in law and is critical to New Yorkers’ public health

said a New York City Law Department spokesperson, who noted that meanwhile, the mandate would remain in place.

According to conventional thinking, mandates were based on the idea that vaccines provided herd immunity which was predicated on herd behavior, i.e. everyone going along with it in order for it to work, “it” being the prevention of transmission. Over the years, there were various estimates on what percentage of the populace needed to get the shots in order to stop the virus circulating – to “beat” the virus. It was only recently that Pfizer admitted that the notion that the shots prevented transmission had never been scientifically verified. 

You wouldn't know that had happened from a speech U.S. President Joe Biden made this week – in fact, on the very same day that the NY judge declared mandates unlawful. Biden was speaking at a White House event designed to promote the new bivalent booster shot that Americans have proven hesitant to get, prior to getting his very own injection.

“If you get it, you're protected,” he said. “And if you don't, you're putting yourself and other people at unnecessary risk.”

What risk?

According to the New York City Law Department, there are two problems with striking down the vaccine mandate. The first is that the mandate “is firmly grounded in law,” and the second is that it is supposedly “critical to New Yorkers' public health.”

Biden can perhaps be excused his confusion about whether or not the shots prevent transmission, for reasons we won't get into here. But the unnamed spokesperson from the NYC Law Department was presumably fully aware of what he was talking about. In that case, how could he possibly cite public health as a reason to keep the mandate, after the judge had pointed out that if the main consideration had truly been public health, the unvaccinated would have been sent home immediately while the question of exemptions was being considered.

The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health; it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. 

In which case we are left with the mandate's being “firmly grounded in law” as apparently being the City's primary consideration. That is to say, the mandate was legal at the time of its imposition, and the fact that it was later proven to be a poor decision with no science to back it up is irrelevant. Judge Porzio was therefore being entirely accurate when he said that the mandate was all about compliance, which is exactly why the City is refusing now to back down.

Across the world we see a similar dynamic playing out, with ideologues from all parts of the political spectrum pledging allegiance to their ideals and clinging to them with astonishing tenacity even long after events have proven them wrong.

We saw this most recently with the resignation speech of former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, who declared, after crashing the financial markets with the “bold” action she had been so determined to take, that she was “more convinced than ever that we need to be bold and confront the challenges we face."

We saw a similar situation following the defeat suffered by the UK Labour party in the 2019 general election, when then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was accused of silently absorbing criticism “in a kind-of martydom way” as if this was the unfortunate price to pay for sticking to the ideals he never renounced, even when the UK public overwhelmingly rejected them.

This, then, is the question of the tipping point between politics as public service and politics as service of the state, or totalitarianism. Science (as it was once practiced, in the pre-COVID era) is dynamic, following the facts and evolving as our knowledge and understanding of the world develops. Politics is not a science. In the imperfect world in which we live, it can only be about making the best of things, of trying to represent the best interests of the most people and protecting them from evil. When it steps beyond those bounds and becomes an end in itself, promoting the system or the ideology rather than the people the system was set up to protect, we see NYC legal spokesmen insisting that they will fight to keep a ridiculous mandate simply because it is “legal.” And we will see (and have seen, throughout history), much worse, every time leaders forget they are here to serve.