Mayor Bill DeBlasio and school chancellor Meisha Porter, are requiring that all public school staff submit proof of COVID-19 vaccination by September 27th, with no option of weekly testing as previously declared. This comes as a major shock and breach of rights as they sought no consultation from the people, nor do their mandates have any constitutional basis. It seems to be a pattern with the local government, to assume the opinions of all of its citizens and to make decisions without consulting the very people who put them in office while encroaching further on our liberties. As many of us know, the entire country has been split in terms of vaccination; to be vaccinated or not. Whatever your stance on this issue is, it MUST be reminded that every single American citizen has the right to their own autonomy and what they do to their body.

It is a shame especially in the city of New York where the idea of “my body my choice” is considered a common sentiment that we should be rallying against government giving us an ultimatum between work and vaccination (DeBlasio and Porter are yet to specifically state what the repercussions would be if one is NOT vaccinated). If someone chooses to not be vaccinated there’s no good reason to prevent them from work; provided that they don’t work with the elderly or immuno-compromised. It should be noted that our local government and various other NGOs have been gaslighting us with numbers without context in order to consolidate more power, but with their own numbers we can gain context to see through the lies. First, not even a full million New Yorkers have been confirmed to be COVID-19 cases, with actual confirmed COVID-19 cases in NYC numbering at 835,789 (as of August 23, 2021); with 182,311 other cases being PROBABLE, that is to say not confirmed. To help paint a better picture, that’s about 9.93% of the NYC population that the last census put at around 8.419 million people.

Knowing that less than ten percent of the city was confirmed to have gotten COVID-19 still doesn’t tell you much, after all, we’re not really caring about all the cases of the common cold are we? So what does that number mean for New Yorkers in practical terms? The NYC.gov website puts the total number of COVID-19 hospitalizations at 118,584, and even if we’re being charitable with what counts as a COVID-19 hospitalization, it should be noted out of all the confirmed NYC cases only around 14.2% resulted in hospitalization, and if we’re talking about the population in general only 1.41% of New Yorkers saw themselves hospitalized due to COVID-19. But what of the final tally, what about the mortality? Death is obviously the ultimate factor in disease, with the number listed for confirmed COVID-19 deaths landing at a whopping 28,589 people which will always be tragic; yet must not obscure that it’s only 3.42% of the confirmed cases and 0.34% of the estimated total NYC population that passed was due to COVID-19.

New York elected officials want to violate your personal and medical rights for a condition that has killed less than 5% of the people that contracted it, not even a half percent of all of New Yorkers and less than a quarter of the people that get hospitalized for it. The media has been gaslighting us with raw numbers or context-less figures in hopes that we’d be too scared to resist the authoritarian power grab that our inept officials are attempting to push in public and private business, or in the case of DeBlasio’s “Key to NYC”; our everyday life as well. Some might add, “This is for the schools, if not for the adult staff then these measures have to be taken for children!” and such a case, as admirable as it is, is even less backed by “the science”. In the total of the US, about 4.5 million minors have tested positive for COVID-19, which is about 14.6% of all COVID-19 cases according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. By our current data, not even one out of seven confirmed cases in the US were children.

While I didn’t manage to find the hospitalization rates, I sadly discovered that as of July twenty-ninth this year 358 children died according to NPR.org, the math puts that at approximately 0.008% of all the children that tested positive for COVID-19. Whether the argument is the fear of contracting COVID-19 from minors, the stats demonstrate that they are not a common vector for COVID-19; and in argument that children are at great risk let me frame this for you, out of the 73 million children in our entire country, less than 0.0005% of them died due to it. Clearly, minors as a whole are most suited against this pandemic so we cannot let their schooling suffer, nor must the liberties of the staff that share spaces with them in schools. We have to clarify the narrative, we have to discern what it is that the authorities want to take for what little they are pretending to give. It is imperative to understand that those few in power, DO NOT have the right to make decisions on behalf of everyone who is not in political power.

 As with many laws/policies there should be an open forum AT THE LEAST. New York citizens have been denied the opportunity to air out their opinions on public platforms such as the Citizen app, whose intended purpose is to “combine location information with 911 intelligence to keep you and your loved ones safe. Unlike social media sites, the app is not designed to encourage time spent or engagement with content. Our success is measured by lives saved. (according to Dominic McMullan spokesperson for Citizen app)”, yet has turned off its comments under the required vaccination for all public school employees post. It is not the first time that the Citizen app has done this. If we let our fear allow government to set terms for what we put in our bodies so that struggling New Yorkers can work, then where does it stop? What’s the limiting principle here, if they’re looking to implement all this drastic policy for an illness that couldn’t even bother 98.5% of New Yorkers then what else would these people be willing to do to us? Please sign this petition and contact our local authority Bill DeBlasio and the heads of the Department of Education, the union leaders and media to let them know that we won’t just play along as they dictate more and more of our lives. No donation needed.

Please join me in contacting our local authority to demand a recall of this mandate 

NYS Governor Kathy Hochul: Phone: 1(518)-474-8390 contact form

Bill DeBlasio contact 

School Chancellor Meisha Porter: Phone: 212- 374-0200 email: NYCChancellor@schools.nyc.gov

UFT president Michael Mulgrew: email: mmulgrew@uft.org