Andrew Cuomo Pioneered Workplace COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates as Governor. Will He Pay for It at the Polls?
He created the first state mandate without a testing option and urged businesses to bar the unvaccinated. Now he's asking New Yorkers who lost jobs and took shots against their will to make him mayor.
Skepticism abounded when former New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced his run for NYC mayor on March 1. On X, his posts are trailed by comments like “You killed my grandmother” and “Cuomo for prison.” There are a lot of “Go away”s.
The guy has a lot of baggage, even for a politician. Yet polls put him clearly in the lead, right out of the gate. Cuomo is billing himself as the candidate who will bring “effective leadership” back. He’s obviously trying to tap into the growing constituency of New Yorkers who are fed up with political disarray and progressives, and just want a moderate urban manager to improve the quality—and cost—of life in the city.
In the recent presidential election, New York City voters shifted noticeably to the right, with the percentage voting for Trump increasing over the 2020 number in every borough. Cuomo might look at that and see a coalition of centrist Republican and Democratic swing voters who could form a solid base for him—the kind of family-oriented, outer-boroughs New Yorkers who take a stable City job or work in the trades or run a neighborhood business.
But there’s one thing a lot of people who fit that description don’t like: COVID-19 vaccine mandates. And Cuomo is New York’s vaccine mandate OG.
Andrew Cuomo, COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate Pioneer
Before any of the COVID-19 vaccines were approved by the FDA, Governor Cuomo announced a vaccine mandate for some 130,000 employees of the State of New York. Many of them would be given the option to test weekly instead of getting the shot, but patient-facing health care workers in state-run public hospitals would not.
That made Cuomo’s mandate the first state-level policy without a testing option to be announced when he unveiled it on July 28, 2021 in an appearance hosted by the Association for a Better New York, calling for it to go into effect by Labor Day (at minute 9:35 in the video below). He encouraged local governments and schools to follow suit.
In that appearance, Cuomo urged the FDA to approve a vaccine so that he could roll out mandates, saying (at minute 12:40):
“I also encourage the FDA to issue final approval of the vaccine. This vaccine right now is under something called Emergency Use Authorization. Under Emergency Use Authorization states are limited as to what they can mandate. Once the vaccine is finally approved, then the state has more legal authority to mandate the vaccine.”
He also advocated for segregating the public by vaccination status, encouraging private businesses to bar unvaccinated New Yorkers from entry (at minute 14:04):
“I also think private-sector businesses can help. And I think you can play a major role. You can admit vaccinated only people into your establishment. I can argue that it is a smart business practice, because I want to go to a safe restaurant, and I want to go to a safe theater, and I want to go to a safe bar. . . . We have sports stadiums that have done it. More businesses should do it. It will again, I think, be an incentive for the business, and it will be an incentive for people to actually get the vaccine. And I urge you all to do it.”
Cuomo followed that announcement with the August 2 introduction of a mandate for transit workers employed by the MTA and Port Authority, also planned to go into effect by Labor Day. (That mandate faced union opposition and was never stringently implemented.)
But the governor had more on his hands than trying to get shots into arms. He had been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, and an investigation by Attorney General Letitia James found that his policies funneled elderly COVID-19-positive hospital patients into nursing homes and his administration undercounted nursing home resident deaths by about 50 percent.
After Democratic Party leaders called for him to step down, Cuomo announced his resignation on August 10 and left office on August 24.
Hear from a New York State agency worker who lost her job under the COVID-19 vaccine mandate Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on July 28, 2021:
The governor, however, didn’t just spend his last couple weeks in office planning his impending extended vacation. On August 16, he announced another mandate, expanding the health care sector requirement to cover all workers in the state, not just state hospital employees.
That state mandate led to 33,982 health care workers losing their jobs for refusing to comply in a range of ways—resigning, taking early retirement, being furloughed, or, for at least 10,555 of them, being fired outright.
Hear from a nurse who lost her job under the COVID-19 vaccine mandate Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on August 16, 2021:
In the press release announcing that mandate, Cuomo again advocated segregation by vaccination status and widespread vaccination requirements for employment and schools:
“[W]e need to do more. I have strongly urged private businesses to implement vaccinated-only admission policies, and school districts to mandate vaccinations for teachers. Neither will occur without the state legally mandating the actions—private businesses will not enforce a vaccine mandate unless it's the law, and local school districts will be hesitant to make these challenging decisions without legal direction.”
On that same day, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio issued an executive order creating the “Key to NYC” mandate. That citywide policy made it mandatory for any “patron, full- or part-time employee, intern, volunteer, or contractor” to show proof of vaccination to enter a restaurant, gym, or entertainment venue, and ordered thousands of dollars in fines for rulebreakers.
It was just the kind of local mandate Cuomo was calling for. The city and state were making coordinated efforts to coerce New Yorkers into taking one of the vaccines that were still under Emergency Use Authorization. De Blasio’s July 26 announcement of a workplace mandate for New York City workers also closely matched Cuomo’s timing, coming two days before the governor unveiled his state worker mandate.
In spite of his enthusiasm for the mandates, Cuomo did not stay in office long enough to implement them. That task fell to his lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul. A mandate enthusiast in her own right, Hochul became more strongly associated with the policies as she put them into effect and had her administration’s lawyers fight for them in court.
But it was the man who would now be mayor who created New York State’s workplace mandates, which together with New York City’s mandates and the private-sector requirements he encouraged, made New York arguably the state with the most draconian COVID-19 vaccination requirements in the nation.
Cuomo’s comments in his mandate announcements give every indication that had he stayed in office, the restrictions would have been even more severe, with the state issuing pervasive mandates covering schools and businesses, effectively creating a statewide vaccine passport system. As the governor explained, widespread vaccination requirements and enforcement would not “occur without the state legally mandating the actions.”
Will New Yorkers Who Hated the Mandates Make One of Their Main Proponents Mayor?
A couple days before Andrew Cuomo officially announced his campaign for mayor, I was in Brooklyn to report on the first meeting of a new Republican club. The reasonably large room the club had reserved for it was filled with people and the founder, attorney Jimmy Wagner, introduced both himself and the club:
“I was a Democrat my entire life,” he said. “I recently converted to becoming a Republican, and the Republicans of Kings County have been nothing but open, welcoming, and supportive of everything we're doing.” At the top of the list of things they’re doing: Fighting to get New York City workers who lost their jobs under the mandates reinstated and compensated with back pay.
Wagner has been representing many of those workers in court for years. Some of them are longtime Republicans, but many have a political story that’s similar to his: They were lifelong Democratic voters, and then the mandates happened. They became RFK Jr. voters, and then Trump voters. They and disaffected Democrats like them across the country played a major role in putting Trump back in office.
Watch the full first meeting of the Donald J. Trump Kings County Republican Club:
Now those voters are looking for local candidates to back who will reinstate fired workers and oppose medical mandates in the future.
You might think they and even all of the fired workers put together don’t add up to enough voters to swing an election, and you would be right. The number of City workers who were fired outright under the NYC mandates is under 2,000. But now add the ones who resigned or retired rather than take the vax, the health care workers who lost jobs under the state mandate, and the untold number of private-sector workers who would not comply. The number climbs.
Hear from workers who lost their jobs under the private-sector mandates that Andrew Cuomo praised in his July 28, 2021 video appearance and encouraged business owners to copy:
The biggest group of anti-mandate voters might be the hardest to count. It’s the mass of workers who complied against their will—the people who took the shot to keep a roof over their family’s head. Add to them the workers who faked their proof of vaccination, another group it’s impossible to count.
In many cases the people who unwillingly complied are just as angry about the mandates as those who didn’t, if not more so. They say they will never forget or forgive the violation of being coerced into taking a brand new pharmaceutical product they didn’t trust. They want to see the people who forced their hand pay.
At a November 10, 2021 press conference, shortly after the mandate deadline for City workers to get the shot, Mayor Bill de Blasio gave a rundown of the numbers of both recent vaccinees and holdouts:
“Since the announcement of the mandate there have been nearly 28,000 new vaccinations among our City workforce . . . As of this morning, only 2,600 employees are on leave without pay . . . We do have 12,400 reasonable accommodation requests pending.”
Allowing for a margin of dawdlers who actually wanted to take the shot, the almost 2,000 who held out and got fired, and a handful who eventually received a reasonable accommodation, that means there were roughly 40,000 City workers who were compelled to take a COVID-19 vaccine in order to keep their job. And that’s just in the public sector. No one knows how many were coerced by their employers when the City imposed its private-sector mandate that December.
Don’t Discount the Vengeance Vote
In New York City, it doesn’t take a lot of voters to swing the Democratic primary for mayor, which many consider to be a de facto general election in this heavily Democratic city. Less than a quarter of registered voters go to the polls to vote for a new mayor, and the new ranked choice voting system can make small groups of dedicated voters even more influential. In the 2021 Democratic primary, Eric Adams defeated Kathryn Garcia in the final round by just 8,426 votes.
Unfortunately for New Yorkers who want to vote against pro-mandate politicians in the Democratic primary (and are still registered as Democrats), the three current front-runners after Cuomo don’t offer great options. Incumbent Eric Adams is the mayor who fired the most workers under the mandates and whose administration continues to fight reinstating them. Brad Lander called for mandates in a July 2021 editorial when he was running for Comptroller.
Scott Stringer might be their best current option simply because he has no history of commenting on mandates one way or another, although in 2021 he proposed incentivizing vaccination with “VaxPacks” that would include a range of freebies like MetroCards and restaurant vouchers. Other strong candidates who have yet to enter the race may provide better alternatives.
If Cuomo does prevail in the primary, defeating him in the general election will be a much taller order. Curtis Sliwa, the party-endorsed Republican candidate, got 312,385 votes when he ran for mayor in 2021, compared to Eric Adams’s 753,801. Sliwa publicly opposed the mandates when they were in place. Independent candidate Jim Walden, who has come out in favor of reinstating fired workers and notably discussed the issue on podcasts with former City workers John Macari and Michael Kane, doesn’t have any significant ranking in polls yet.
But either of those candidates might attack Cuomo on the mandate/reinstatement issue to gain support among anti-mandate New Yorkers and erode Cuomo’s support in the primary, in the hope of ending up with a weaker opponent in the general.
Both Sliwa and Walden have probably spent enough time talking to New Yorkers who hated the mandates to understand that even if those voters know their candidate can’t win in the end, they want mandaters to lose. They want them to pay a heavy political price as a warning to others who might consider such policies in the future. And for all of the strife the mandates brought them, they want a taste of political revenge.
It’s still early days for the 2025 mayoral race—only March. But as New Yorkers mark the fifth anniversary of Governor Andrew Cuomo putting “New York State on PAUSE” this month and start thinking back over the policies that followed—the lockdowns, shutdowns, school closures, public segregation, family members who died alone, nursing home deaths, and then the mandates that upended so many lives—Cuomo may see support from the moderate voters who should be his base begin to slide.
Hear from more workers who lost their jobs under private-sector COVID-19 vaccine mandates that Andrew Cuomo encouraged businesses to implement when he was governor of New York:
By all means, let's not forget the nursing home murders.
Notice how they "approved" a shot that was never available?
Only the eua clot shots were being given.
Why haven't lawyers pointed that out? No, they're stupidly fighting over transmission and other idiotic technicalities.
The legal system is corrupt on all sides.
Cuomo is guilty of democide and those families harmed by his nursing home murders deserve justice.
POLITICIANS SHOULD HAVE TO PASS A PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST FOR EMPATHY, WHICH WOULD SCREEN OUT SOCIOPATHS AND PSYCHOPATHS.
If they can test police and other jobs they can do it for this.
Let's add executives of publicly traded companies too.
GET RID OF PSYCHOPATHS FROM POSITIONS OF POWER AND WE CAN HAVE PEACE AND PROGRESS.