NYC COVID Vaccinations Spike After Mandates Take Hold: Data

NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Bill de Blasio couldn't hide his frustration.

In July, vaccinations against COVID-19 plateaued, then began to drop to levels that would leave New York City vulnerable to the delta variant. Hesitancy, if not outright resistance, to the vaccine appeared to grow. Lies about the shot spread.

"We've got to be blunt about it: you're not getting vaccinated, you're actually causing harm to other people," de Blasio said on July 20.

One day later, de Blasio set the city's first vaccination mandate — a shot or testing rule for city health care workers.

Since then, the city has been — in the mayor's words — "climbing the ladder" of ever-more expansive vaccination rules, extending to indoor spaces, teachers and other school staff and city workers.

And vaccinations have spiked. Data shows the average of shots per day increased 45 percent since de Blasio unveiled the first mandate.

"We were able to create extraordinary progress on vaccination, which has lowered the impact of COVID in this city, which has sped up our recovery," he said last week. "We did that by being creative. We did that by doing things we had never done before and weren't done any place else."

But resistance to vaccinations remain among many New Yorkers who fall under mandates.

Union leaders for teachers and school administrators warned de Blasio that even though their members are more than 90 percent vaccinated, that means thousands of staff are still unvaccinated. That's enough to create a "nightmare scenario" at schools the day after the Sept. 27 deadline to get vaccinated, they said.

Still, the modest surge in vaccinations since July 21 — and mandates took effect Aug. 16 and Sept. 13 — accounted for 1.35 million doses distributed, according to data.

The city during the mandate era surpassed 10 million and 11 million doses into New Yorkers' arms.