Stick fork in COVID
Adams tours eateries as vax-to-dine rules end
He’s in a post-COVID state of mind.
Mayor Adams went restaurant hopping in Manhattan’s East Village on Monday to celebrate the end of the city’s indoor vaccine mandate while imploring New Yorkers to stop living in fear of a potential future COVID-19 outbreak.
The food tour brought a jubilant Adams to four neighborhood eateries — including Ukrainian mainstay Veselka, where he lunched on vegetarian borscht, pierogis and stuffed cabbage — as well as a skatepark and a deli. He walked to each stop with a flock of reporters and local elected officials in tow for what amounted to a nearly two-hour in-motion press conference.
“We may have to do this again with COVID, but in the meantime, we can’t sit at home hoping that it doesn’t come while our city is not prospering,” Adams said outside Veselka when asked if he’s concerned that his removal of the indoor vaccine mandate could trigger a coronavirus resurgence.
The mandate, known as Key2NYC and implemented last August, officially ended Monday morning, meaning people can now patronize restaurants, bars, gyms and other indoor establishments in the city without having to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
Some public health experts pleaded with Adams for weeks to not do away with the mandate, arguing it’s a relatively small burden that incentivizes vaccination and hedges against potential future outbreaks amid fear that new variants of the virus could still emerge.
But Adams countered during his East Village extravaganza that business owners can still require proof of vaccination for customers if they want.
Personally, though,
Adams said he doesn’t care if he’s around unvaccinated people anymore.
“We’re going to continue to encourage them to get vaccinated, but if they’re not, I am not offended,” he told reporters while walking to a skatepark in the neighborhood, where he briefly attempted to ride a board borrowed from a local skater.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who joined Adams for the Monday festivities, struck a more prudent tone.
“I think it’s important to remind the public that while we’ve made enormous progress on the pandemic, we’re still seeing about 500 cases a day in the city and so we want people to be cautious,” said Levine, who was a major proponent of Key2NYC while chairing the City Council’s Health Committee before his election as beep last year.
Asked if he would’ve preferred that Adams kept the mandate, Levine demurred: “This is not my event, so I’m not going to overly pontificate, but let’s just say I think our messaging is united in the fact that folks still need to be vaccinated, they still need to be safe.”
As Hizzoner enjoyed the East Village dining scene, the state Department of Health reported that another 17 New Yorkers died from COVID-19 on Sunday, including four people in the city. In total, nearly 40,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the Big Apple.
Adams has pressed the case that scrapping public health precautions will help resurrect the city’s economy.
But Dr. Jay Varma, former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s top pandemic adviser, said he doesn’t buy that argument.
“Celebrating the removal of Key2NYC requires you to believe against all evidence that feasible, acceptable, affordable, beneficial COVID19 protections are bad for business, rather than virus’s ability to cause unpredictably large surges of illness and death,” Varma tweeted Monday.
Tom Birchard, co-owner of Veselka, said he supports Adams’ shutdown of Key2NYC, but agreed with Varma that the mandate didn’t hurt his bottom line.
“It wasn’t ever that much of a hardship because people were so incredibly cooperative,” Birchard said.
While giving the unvaccinated a pass, Adams got into a spat with a heckler over another public health issue while outside MáLà Project, one of the restaurants he visited.
“Stop smoking those cigarettes,” Adams told the heckler, who was smoking while shouting criticisms at the mayor. “You have to go higher in your life and not smoke cigarettes, so let’s do that together, OK?”