As we near the final days of his term, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is taking his final shot at children by implementing an indoor vaccine mandate.
This means that kids will not be able to dine indoors at restaurants, visit museums or do any number of other cultural activities around the city. Additionally, children ages five to eleven will no longer be able “to participate in high-risk extracurriculars including sports, band, and dance.”
The new rules are as cruel as they are pointless.
Twenty percent of New York City children ages five to eleven are vaccinated against COVID-19. That number is actually pretty high as kids face an extremely low risk of any kind of poor COVID outcome. Since the start of the pandemic, 630 children ages zero to seventeen have died from COVID. The CDC labels their deaths as “involving” COVID-19. For comparison, 486 kids died of the flu in just 2019. That’s over twelve months, not the twenty-one we use to count COVID deaths.
Yet we never mandated flu vaccines to eat at restaurants. We never barred children from participating in sports until they got a flu shot. And we never stuck them in masks indefinitely, even outdoors, as schools across New York City have done. It’s frighteningly anti-child but New Yorkers are mostly quiet in response.
De Blasio did concede that the vaccine is relatively new. But then instead of accepting that parents may not want their kids taking a vaccine they don’t need, he prattled on about incentives:
Before Omicron grows, before Delta continues to stress us even worse in the winter months, get your kid vaccinated. And here’s an incentive to do it. A lot of parents, of course, want to take their kids out to wonderful things that’ll be happening in the holiday season. Here’s a reminder, get your child vaccinated. Just one dose will immediately qualify any child to be able to participate in those activities. But look, I’m a parent. And I remember vividly when my kids were going to school. You know, you don’t end up in a situation where a child is left unprotected. I urge parents really strongly, get that vaccination. It’s safe. It’s been proven. Here’s another incentive to do it.
This kind of gibberish (what does how “vividly” he remembers when his kids were at school have to do with literally any of this?) is part and parcel of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reign. Children have consistently been targeted, from destroying the city’s best schools while doing nothing to help the worst ones to keeping kids masked. Yet somehow the mayor doesn’t seem to “vividly” recall what it means to care about small children caught up in the hysteria of grown-ups.
The worst part is that there are few who are outraged. There are no protests, no movement for sane change. New Yorkers have just accepted that these rules will be a part of our lives. It’s Mayor de Blasio’s anti-child city. We’re just living in it.
