The Elicker administration is preparing an order requiring city government employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19. It’s just making sure to get the policy right.
The official quarterbacking that process, Community Services Administrator Mehul Dalal, disclosed that information during an apperance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“We’ve done a deep dive exploration into vaccine mandates,” he said. “We should be coming out with something soon on that.”
But first the city needs to nail down how to navigate privacy concerns about access to employees’ health data. “We anticipate” that the city will “cross the t’s and dot the i’s” and produce a policy, Dalal said.
New York City, the state of California, and the federal Department of Veteran Affairs last month beat New Haven to the punch in announcing vaccine mandates of government workers. (New York has also issued a vaccine mandate for restaurant customers and employees.) New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio specifically bypassed a mask mandate in conjunction with his vaccine mandate decisions; he argued that the mask mandate would distract attention from the much more effective vaccination quest. New Haven last week became the first city in the state to reinstitute a mask mandate for public indoor spaces.
“There’s privacy concerns around accessing health privacy data, That has to be navigated. To my understanding, employers are allowed to ask [about vaccination.”
Some critiques of vaccine mandates and promoters of vaccine hesitancy — most notably Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene — have suggested the health privacy laws may prevent governments from requiring employees to get the shots. Mayor Justin Elicker made a similar suggestion at a July 30 press conference when he first discussed “exploring” an employee mask mandate. Experts have roundly debunked and dismissed that claim.
“I think we’re going to get around these issues. We just don’t want to get it wrong,” Dalal said.
“You want to be extra cautious in the face of uncertainty.”
That philosophy has guided other decisions Dalal has put together along with Health Director Maritza Bond throughout the pandemic.
He described how that philosophy helped his team get one decision right that other public-health policymakers didn’t get right: Hesitating to declare earlier this year that the pandemic was on its way out.
Unlike other cities, New Haven never dropped its rule that people must wear masks in city government buildings.
Dalal said that he considered the victory declarations “premature” in recent months, when case loads and hospitalizations plunged. He has relatives in India who were reporting people getting sick from the Delta variant sweeping that country; one of his in-laws died. He looked at the data not just in the U.S., but in the U.K., where Delta caused a swift resurgence in Covid months before it did the same here.
“This is a global issue, not a local issue,” he said of Covid, and health policy makers need to make local decisions in that context.
He’s hoping that, as in the U.K., Delta will flame out as abruptly in the U.S. as it swept through communities, meaning the current resurgence will be short-lived. He doesn’t expect New Haven to return to the more severe restrictions of a year ago.
Dalal, a physician, came to his city post, right before the pandemic started, from a series of previous positions that prepared him for public-health policymaking and data parsing. He served as the state health department’s chronic disease director, director of New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Cardiovascular Disease Program, and member of public-health boards including the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors and the Connecticut State Health Improvement Advisory Council.
Dalal was asked if the Board of Education is getting its school-bus policy backwards: It’s requiring students to wear masks on buses; but it is not requiring drivers, who could potentially spread Covid-19 to kids, to be vaccinated. Dalal declined to weigh on that decision, noting that the Board of Education does not fall under his authority.
Click on the video at the top of this article to watch the full interview with Dalal on WNHH’s “Dateline New Haven,” in which he discussed Covid-19 health policy at length along with his current efforts to reorganize city government handling of substance abuse, 911 emergency calls, homelessness, and prison reentry under a new “Community Resilience” department.
Response to: "Dalal was asked if the Board of Education is getting its school-bus policy backwards: It's requiring students to wear masks on buses; but it is not requiring drivers, who could potentially spread Covid-19 to kids, to be vaccinated. Dalal declined to weigh on that decision, noting that the Board of Education does not fall under his authority"
If staff who work with students will have to be vaccinated, then why wont students themselves be required to get vaccinated? All students of age (over 12) should be required to get a Covid vaccine, as well as the staff. Its not an "adult only" disease.
For example, there is no reason at all that a vaccinated 65 year old Chemistry teacher who teaches high school 11th grade students should be exposed to those 16-18 year old students if they are not* vaccinated. The SAME applies to bus drivers and anyone working with students. Those students should be forced to learn from home if they are not vaccinated. Why sacrifice the teachers, paras, or bus drivers for the students? The schools are huge, the teens have the germs, and those certain students are of age to receive the vaccine. Staff don't want the exposure either, so if you are going to force staff, you have to for students to get the vaccines as well!