Hey, remember how "thousands" of NYPD cops were going to be on leave today? Actual number: 34.
And so another much-hyped antivax threat dies with a whimper.
The NY Post reports today that, despite threats that many thousands of NYPD employees wouldn’t be showing up to work today, in fact only 34 police and 40 civilian members of the NYPD were actually put on leave. The NYPD does acknowledge, however, that there are roughly 6,500 exemption requests working their way through the system. I expect the vast majority of those will be denied because only a relative handful will prove to be legit as opposed to petulant whining, but that won’t happen all at once, and in fact the article states that they will be dealt with over the coming weeks. I expect some (many?) of those people will either see the writing on the wall and have gotten vaccinated by the time their request is considered, or else will get it once their request is denied. In any case, the number of employees lost will not be the catastrophic prognostications made by the right wing and police unions. It might put some strain on the force for a bit, but at the same time, I wager that some of those protesting getting the shots are probably not the sort that are desirable in law enforcement in the first place, so the NYPD may well be better off without them anyway.
The Post also notes a pretty sharp uptick last week of vaccinations in the force, jumping nearly 15 percent to 85 percent of NYPD’s staff being vaccinated, leaving approximately 8,000 police and civilian staff still to be vaccinated. I’m a little unclear, if there are 6,500 exemption requests and 8,000 unvaxxed employees, why the number of people on leave wasn’t about 1,500 today, but I assume NYPD has their reasons — perhaps some of those people are scheduled to get vaccinated and so have been given a brief deferral pending that, some may already have approved exemptions or deferrals, etc.