Florida Mayor Mandates All County Employees Get Vaccinated

A nurse prepares to administer the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine at a drive-thru COVID-19 vaccin
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Hannah Knudsen

Jerry Demings, the Democrat mayor of Florida’s Orange County, announced this week that all county employees must be vaccinated by the end of September, falling in line with the Biden administration’s push for all federal employees to receive the jab.

“I have issued an internal order requiring county employees to be fully vaccinated by the end of September,” Demings announced this week, explaining that he does not want to see “another person test positive in this community.” It is a lofty wish, given that thousands of fully vaccinated individuals across the nation are testing positive for the virus. For example, more than 25 percent of the recent positive cases of the Chinese coronavirus in Los Angeles County, which has an indoor mask mandate in place, are among fully vaccinated people.

Currently, Demings’ mandate only applies to non-union employees, who are expected to get their first shot by August 31 unless they successfully obtain an exemption on religious or medical grounds.

Officials are also ordering all county employees to wear masks inside county buildings, even if they are fully vaccinated. “I want to show our residents and visitors that Orange County is being proactive in lowering the spread of the virus,” Demings said. “I’m asking other businesses to follow our lead.”

Demings, husband of Democrat Senate candidate Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), also lamented the position he is in, unable to issue sweeping mandates due to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) administration and the Florida legislature’s barring local governments from overstepping their bounds.

“Because we are here in the state of Florida, and the Florida legislature passed certain laws that significantly restricted the ability of local governments to issue mandates, we find ourselves in this position today,” the Democrat mayor said. “I’m taking the action that I believe is legally defensible.”

He also declared a local state of emergency for the county, which includes major cities, including Orlando.

DeSantis responded to Demings’ call, noting that he personally opposes such mandates across the board.

“The issue is are you going to say you have to show this [a vaccine passport] to come into a movie theater or a ball game or whatever. Now from an employment perspective, that is a completely different thing than vaccine passports,” he said.

“I don’t support mandates either way, but that’s a separate issue for employers, that’s a different thing, there’s a separate body of law with that. The vaccine passport is kind of a new concept, that if you want to participate in different aspects of society — things that we do all the time, you gotta show it,” he added. “I think that’s a bad idea”:

On Thursday, President Biden is expected to lay out his order for federal government employees to get the vaccine or submit themselves to regular testing. He has continued to blame unvaccinated people for the pandemic in the country.

“We have a pandemic, because of the unvaccinated and they’re sowing enormous confusion,” he said, adding, “If those other 100 million got vaccinated, we’d be in a very different world.”

A majority of those who have not been vaccinated do not plan on getting the jab, according to The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey released last week.

Meanwhile, Democrats are beginning to show their hand as they demand people get vaccinated, some hinting it should not be voluntary anymore.

“We’ve got to shake people at this point and say ‘c’mon now.’ We tried voluntary. We could not have been more kind and compassionate as a country. Free testing …  incentives, friendly warm embrace — the voluntary phase is over,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said:

Similarly, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) expressed the need to knock on doors, put people in cars, “drive them and get that vaccine in their arm”:

“That is the mission,” the Democrat governor said.

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