Chris Lange, FISM News

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A Manhattan supreme court judge on Friday handed a major victory to New York City’s finest with a ruling that NYPD officers fired for refusing the city’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate must be reinstated.

Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank ruled that the city’s mandate was invalid “to the extent it has been used to impose a new condition of employment” on members of New York City’s largest police union, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), according to a New York Post report. Frank also said the mandate extended beyond “monetary sanctions” allowed under the law and that it would be a “gross overstatement” of the city’s Department of Mental Health and Hygiene to say it could enforce the vaccine mandate through termination, unpaid leave, or suspension. Such measures, he said, unlawfully altered conditions of employment that must be made through collective bargaining agreements between the city employer and the union.

The justice went on to say in the ruling that, while the “Court does not deny that at the time it was issued the vaccine mandate was appropriate and lawful,” the city nonetheless failed to provide “a legal basis or lawful authority for the DOH to exclude employees from the workplace and impose any other adverse employment action as an appropriate enforcement mechanism of the vaccine mandate.”

PBA President Pat Lynch praised the ruling in a statement.

This decision confirms what we have said from the start: the vaccine mandate was an improper infringement on our members’ right to make personal medical decisions in consultation with their own health care professionals. We will continue to fight to protect those rights.

New York City’s Law Department plans to appeal the ruling, claiming it is “at odds with every other court decision upholding the mandate as a condition of employment.”

FISM previously reported that the Police Benevolent Association sued the city last October over former New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s mandate requiring 160,000 city workers, including NYPD officers, to get the vaccine or face termination.

“From the beginning of the de Blasio administration’s haphazard vaccine rollout, we have fought to make the vaccine available to every member who chooses it, while also protecting their right to make that personal medical decision in consultation with their own doctor,” Lynch said at the time.

The Friday ruling came just days after another Manhattan judge ruled that Brooklyn Police Officer Alexander Deletto should keep his job after refusing the vaccine. Deletto’s request for a religious exemption was denied by the department for reasons that remain unclear, The Post Millennial reported. 

The ruling comes less than a week after NYC mayor Eric Adams announced that he was suspending the city’s strict vaccine requirement for private businesses and school children participating in extra-curricular activities on Nov. 1. He, however, said he was keeping a vaccine requirement for over 300,000 city workers in place.