NEW YORK – New York health workers who have been fired for failing to vaccinate against COVID-19 must be reinstated and receive a back wage, a state judge ruled in a ruling released Tuesday.
Sitting on Staten Island, state Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio found the city health commissioner overruled his authority and violated due process and equal protection rights for workers when he banned their work.
Porzio also cited Mayor Eric Adams’ revocation of the vaccine mandate for some private employees earlier this year, most notably athletes and entertainers, as evidence that the public worker mandate was arbitrary and unreasonable. .
“There is nothing in the proceedings to support the rationality of maintaining the vaccination mandate for civil servants and revoking the mandate for private sector employees or creating an exception for certain professions, such as entertainers, athletes or entertainers. “, Porzio wrote. . “This is a clear, arbitrary and capricious action because we are dealing with identical unvaccinated people who are treated differently by the same administrative agency.”
On Tuesday, the city’s legal department said it had challenged Porzio’s ruling.
Porzio rejected the City Council’s argument that the workers’ lawsuit had to be closed because it was filed too late, instead establishing that time began ticking in June, when the Department of Health sent letters to workers offering them the job if they were vaccinated. and not in March, when Adams exempted private sector employees.
In an e-mailed statement, the City Legal Department said it “strongly disagrees with this ruling as the mandate is firmly rooted in the law and is critical to the public health of New Yorkers.”
Adams, a Democrat, announced last month that he would lift the private sector COVID-19 vaccination mandate on November 1, but keep it for public sector employees.
The city implemented the public sector vaccination mandate in October 2021 and extended it to the private sector in December, just as the wave of the COVID-19 Omicron variant began claiming hundreds of lives in the city. It remains the largest place in the United States to make vaccinations mandatory as an occupational safety measure.
