BLAS’ NEW VACCINE (EM)PLOY Pushes private biz to institute jab mandates
The city marriage bureau opened just in time for these lovebirds.
Serenity Newson and new hubby Tyreke Punch were among the first people to get hitched in a civil service Friday, as the bureau’s offices came out of their 16-month COVID-19 shutdown and started performing wedding ceremonies again.
For the Queens couple, the big day doesn’t just include their nuptials at the bureau’s lower Manhattan offices — the pregnant Newson was scheduled to deliver the couple’s baby at a Long Island hospital later in the day.
“I’m feeling excited and ready to start this new chapter. I’m ready to have the baby,” said Newson, 27, who works as a cook at a Chinese restaurant.
“I’m going in right after this, so it’s going to be a hectic day.”
Newson wore a white wedding dress and cradled her belly as city clerk Michael McSweeney performed the service.
The couple — who met while working at Shake Shack about a year ago — is expecting a boy, and was planning to head to Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park for their second big moment of the day.
“I’ve seen online that they open today, so I make sure to get an appointment,” said Newson. “But, you know, it was the same day I had to go in to be induced. But everything worked perfectly so now I can just run in after this.”
The pair’s wedding was among 50 marriage ceremonies scheduled at the fully booked Worth Street office on Friday’s first day of marriage ceremonies since the pandemic began.
Mayor de Blasio announced on July 15 that the city’s marriage bureau, which has an office in all five boroughs, would reopen Monday to start booking appointments and that ceremonies would begin Friday.
The bureau closed on March 20, 2020, days ahead of the pandemic’s peak in New York City.
Some of the couples who headed to lower Manhattan Friday had been waiting a long time for their marriage certificates.
“We waited like two years, because of the pandemic,” Sae Feurtado, 32, told The Post, after hugging husband Richard Kissi. “I feel like I’m on cloud nine.”
Mayor de Blasio called on private employers Friday to impose vaccination requirements as workers begin to head back to the office, as part of his latest bid to head off a surge in COVID cases driven by the more contagious Delta variant of the virus.
De Blasio’s remarks on WNYC came just two days after he imposed a mandate on employees of the city’s public hospital system and the Health Department’s community clinics to finally get vaccinated or face weekly coronavirus testing.
“We tried purely voluntary for over half a year. We tried every form of incentives,” he said during his weekly appearance on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” “But now we’ve got to go further, we’ve reached the limits of a purely voluntary system.
“It’s time for more mandates,” he added.
De Blasio’s remarks are the latest in a dramatic about-face for the mayor, who insisted for weeks the city could convince vaccinehesitant New Yorkers to get their shots through public awareness campaigns and incentives, like raffles for transit MetroCards and weekend “stay-cation” holidays in local hotels.
That was before coronavirus case numbers and testing positivity rates began to tick up across the five boroughs, a surge driven by the Delta variant, which accounted for 57 percent of coronavirus cases here over the last four weeks, new Health Department statistics show.
And it was before the Delta variant drove devastating new outbreaks in rural communities across the southern United States, in places like Missouri and Alabama, where vaccination campaigns have been hamstrung.
Officials here say New York City’s comparatively high rate of vaccination — 70 percent of adult residents have at least one shot — has helped to prevent mass outbreaks, but warn the Delta variant poses a tremendous threat to New Yorkers who won’t get their jabs.
“The Delta variant is like a freight train coming on, we’ve got to take it real seriously,” he said.
“We’ve tried everything else and we got results, but we need more” people to get vaccinated, de Blasio later reiterated. “I urge every employer to go with whatever form of mandate you are comfortable with because it will help us fight COVID.”
He continued: “If people want freedom, if people want jobs, if people want to be able to live again, we have got to get more people vaccinated.”
The mandate push is gaining traction around the globe as other authorities seek to tamp down variant-fueled outbreaks.
The French government announced that its citizens would be required to show proof of vaccination for everything from going to movies and eating indoors to boarding a plane or train.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s “big stick” strategy — soon to be codified by the national legislature — prompted protests from the far left and far right, but also reignited the country’s oncestalled vaccination drive.
More than 3.7 million people there have signed up for shots since Macron’s directive was laid out.
“I think that’s a direction that we need to seriously consider,” de Blasio said, when asked about the French restrictions. “We’re watching the situation daily.”
In that vein, de Blasio hinted to Lehrer that he was considering requiring proof of vaccination to attend the several large concerts City Hall is organizing this summer to celebrate the city’s reopening.
Mandates are also gaining traction in cities stateside. San Francisco recently announced it would require all of its municipal employees to get vaccinated despite opposition from municipal labor unions there.
De Blasio has strongly hinted he’s considering eventually expanding the city’s limited mandate further, but has repeatedly declined to provide more details about which agencies it might apply to next and when it would be imposed.
He took that tack again when he was pressed by Lehrer over details of any coming expansion of the shots-or-test mandate.
“I’ve been very explicit about the fact that this is a beginning and we’re going to climb up the ladder of measures to address this situation,” de Blasio said. “We’re going to be making announcements piece by piece.”