Vaccination will be mandatory in New York

NEW YORK VACCINATION-  The Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, announced that all private sector employees in the city must be vaccinated against the coronavirus as of December 27.

The mayor thus goes further than the US president, Joe Biden, whose mandatory vaccination order, which was to take effect on January 4 and is currently suspended by the courts, only concerns workers in companies with more than 100 employees.

“Here in New York, we have decided to launch a preemptive strike (against the coronavirus) to do something bold to stop the spread of COVID and the dangers it poses to everyone,” de Blasio said on MSNBC television.

He specified that all “private sector workers in New York are subject to the obligation to be vaccinated as of December 27,” which affects some 184 thousand companies and businesses.

Also, from the same date, “New Yorkers over 12 years old will have to present proof that they have received three doses of the vaccine” to be able to enter public places such as restaurants and theaters, according to the mayor, who ends his post on December 31 and will be replaced by Eric Adams, elected at the polls on November 2.

Meanwhile, Sarah Gilbert, one of the scientists behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, said that future pandemics could be even more deadly than COVID-19, so the lessons learned from the outbreak should not be wasted and the world should make sure you are prepared for the next viral attack.

“This will not be the last time that a virus threatens our lives and livelihoods. The truth is, the next one could be worse. It could be more contagious, or more deadly, or both, ”Gilbert warned in excerpts from a speech to be broadcast on the BBC.

The Oxford University professor of immunology, who helped create a vaccine against COVID-19 that is now used in more than 170 countries, will ask that scientific advances made in the fight against coronavirus not be “lost” by default. financing.

In turn, the Chinese epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan stated that one of the requirements for China to “regain normalcy” is that the fatality rate of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which is currently at 1 percent, “falls to around 0.1 percent”.