COVID vaccination rate for NYC municipal workforce lags behind city’s total as thousands scoff at shots

Post Date: 
2021-07-29
Source: 
New York Daily News


About 47% of the NYPD’s 50,000 employees have received at least one shot. The rate is slightly higher, 54%, among the FDNY’s workforce of 17,000, which includes EMS workers who treated countless desperate patients in the spring of 2020 as the city clocked hundreds of COVID-19 deaths per day.



The Correction Department recorded the lowest rate of vaccinations among city agencies, with just 33% of its 10,000 employees having received at least one shot, the data show.



City officials said the data shared Tuesday may not account for vaccines that were administered outside the five boroughs.



Municipal workers have a low vaccination rate even though many of them were given first dibs when the shots became available last year.



“These folks are our first responders and our frontline workers,” said Dr. Bob Bollinger, a professor of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Of all the groups I can think of, they really are the ones who need to be vaccinated to protect not just themselves, but also their communities and the people they interact with on a daily basis.”