Trying to Coax Holdouts Into Doing Right Thing

"It's the only way you're gonna return to normal," Pat Bahnken said of the de Blasio administration's suddenly intensified efforts to get more of its workers vaccinated, particularly—and somewhat surprisingly—health-care and uniformed employees. "You don't want young, healthy people to be carriers across the city. From a virology standpoint, you could be running around setting fires all over the city and then running around trying to put them out."

But, said the man who headed District Council 37's Emergency Medical Technicians Local 2507 for nearly 13 years starting in 1999, the easy solution of compelling those who for whatever reason hadn't gotten vaccinated—which included half the members of his old local—by making it a condition of their continued employment, wasn't quite that simple.