Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on the Mehdi Hasan Show

September 1, 2021

Mehdi Hasan: So, much has happened over the course of the pandemic that it's easy to forget how a year-and-a-half ago New York City was the worst hotspot in America. It was on this exact date 18 months ago that a health care worker who lived in Manhattan became the city’s and the state’s first confirmed case of the coronavirus. The city and its surrounding suburbs, over 20 million people, had far more cases than many countries had at the time. And certainly, more than the rest of the nation. This is what the U.S. looked like on April the 15th of last year with New York State outpacing the rest of the country, most of those cases in the City of New York. Now, look at how the situation has evolved across the U.S. since then in this interactive map from our friends at PBS News Hour, as cases of the coronavirus have exploded among the unvaccinated, particularly in the south. But turning back the clock in New York City at the start of the pandemic, refrigeration trucks would be brought in to serve as makeshift morgues. A charitable organization would build a field hospital in Central Park among the dog walkers and not far from where kids would still play, to handle it’s overflow of patients from Mount Sinai Hospital across Fifth Avenue. The military would convert the city's massive convention center into another field hospital. The Navy would send its hospital ship to dock in the Hudson River. And every night at 7:00 pm this is what New York City would sound like – 

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Cheering, clapping, and the banging of pots and pans as New Yorkers gathered up their windows to thank health care workers. It was the sound of hope. All the while, the Mayor, Bill de Blasio, and then-Governor Andrew Cuomo were under fire for their initial response to the crisis. Much of the time, the two were fighting about their COVID strategies, with each other, over when to shut down and what to shut down and who had the authority to do so and how to communicate it all to the public. But things in New York eventually got better. If not between the Mayor and the governor, at least things got better regarding the coronavirus. Central Park went from hosting a field hospital to holding a Homecoming concert. New York's vaccination drive was part of that. And yet with the Delta variant and school starting and colder weather just around the corner, there are questions about whether it will be enough. Joining us now to talk about all of this is the Mayor of New York city then and now, Bill de Blasio. Mr. Mayor, thanks so much for joining me on the show tonight. 

You've done a lot recently to get New Yorkers vaccinated. Educators have to be vaccinated. Health care workers, City employees, they have to be vaccinated or tested weekly. There are new vaccine mandates for restaurants, other public venues. I welcome all of that. I wish Republican governors in the south were doing what you're doing. But I wonder, do you have more planned on the vaccination front, given the scale of the challenge? What else can you do to get numbers up? 

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, Mehdi, I have to tell you we've had a vision of fighting back aggressively with mandates, with incentives as well, including the $100 incentive for anyone who comes in new to get vaccinated. Something President Biden bought into right away and encouraged folks to do all over the country. That's been really helpful. So, I keep saying we're climbing a ladder of both incentives and mandates to find more and more ways to reach people. And it's having a huge impact. The vaccination numbers are going up markedly. And Mehdi, they're particularly going up amongst Black and Latino New Yorkers. And we are literally at this point willing to go to people's homes, we will send vaccinators to your home, to be able to give you in-person vaccination for your whole family. And each family member gets $100 incentive who's eligible to be vaccinated. I mean, this is a very hands-on, grassroots effort. It's making a huge impact. And people are really copying a lot of the things we're doing here. There's a powerful poll that The Hill just came out with, almost a thousand employers making clear that about half of them already are putting vaccine mandates of different kinds in place. When the nation's largest city moves, it helps public and private sector move around the country. That was part of what we hoped to do, and we're really seeing the impact now. 

Hasan: So, what's next? What more can be done to get those numbers out? Is it a matter of paying people more, giving more money out? 

Mayor: I think we're going to look at a range of options, including of course the potential for additional mandates. We got a sense – I certainly believe in sequencing. Right now, the focus is on bringing school back. It's just a couple of weeks away. That's a very strong mandate. We're going to make sure that works. But we're looking at a variety of other options. But also, the incentive front is really important to note. The $100 incentive has been particularly effective. We have a new incentive we've just started with physicians – we finally got some federal support for this – to literally provide extra financial support to physicians if they systematically reach out to their patients to talk about vaccination, to encourage it, to demystify it, to help people make appointments. We want to reward individual physicians who literally take a list of all their patients and work all the way through it because that's one of the most trusted voices in anyone's life.  

Hasan: Interesting.  

Mayor: And – but it hasn't been organized as such and there hasn't been the kind of resource incentive that would help. We've now put those pieces together. $35 million program here in the city that I think is going to make a big difference. 

Hasan: We could only hope. Mr. Mayor, I also saw that regarding restaurants in your city, you announced that patrons will be allowed to dine as soon as they get their first COVID shot. Literally, as soon as they've got the shot, you said, which is a nice sentiment, but it makes no scientific sense, does it, given you don't get immunity from the virus straight after the shot, especially the first shot. It takes a couple of weeks.  

Mayor: It makes strategic sense. And this is why our health care leaders have really bought into this idea because it's an incentive to get more people vaccinated. Look, Mehdi, the whole idea was vaccination. You can talk about any other tools, any other pieces of the equation, but what we decided here, having been the epicenter as you powerfully laid out earlier, we decided there's one strategy, it is vaccination and getting to the most pervasive level of vaccination possible. Now, I'm happy to tell you, 77 percent of adults in New York City right now have gotten at least one dose and almost everyone who gets the first dose comes back for the second. So, the strategic idea there was, let's say to people, particularly young people who have been more hesitant, less engaging in the vaccine, if you want to enjoy life in New York City – it's one of the things, young people flock here to do the restaurants, the bars, the concerts – if you want all that, you have to be vaccinated. But we're not telling you, you have to wait a month or six weeks. We're trying to get people to just get started immediately. Even the first dose infers some protection. We know that scientifically. But this is strategic. Well, this is about convincing them [inaudible] – 

Hasan: It doesn’t confer protection immediately, though. 

Mayor: Look, the first dose [inaudible] – 

Hasan: It doesn’t confer protection immediately, but I take your point about incentives.  

Mayor: It confers protection. But our point is a strategic one. If someone gets vaccinated for the first time – 

Hasan: Understood – 

Mayor: They are on the pathway to getting vaccinated totally. And that – 

Hasan: Yes, you make – that’s a good point. 

Mayor: And there's plenty of other safety measures on top of that, let's be clear, including in our restaurants. But the key is, get people vaccinated. You got to get them started.  

Hasan: Agreed. Mr. Mayor, you've earned plaudits for your leadership on COVID, on vaccinations this year. As you said, you've led the way on some of the mandate policies. But looking back on that awful period in New York's history, the start of the pandemic, the spring of 2020, your critics, as you know, say you mishandled the situation, you didn't take the pandemic seriously enough, early enough. I want to play a bit of sound and get your reaction on the other side, have a listen.  

Mayor: Look, we're also telling people to not avoid restaurants, not avoid, you know, the normal things that would do. This does not transmit through food or drink. So, people should go out and continue to live life, should go out to restaurants. 

Hasan: In hindsight saying, carry on with life as normal on March the 11th, that was the day that WHO officially declared a pandemic, that was a mistake we can all agree right now can’t we? 

Mayor: Well, based on what we know now, of course, but that's not the point. The point is we – the information we had at the time. At the time, we had evidence of a small number of cases. We did not know until much later how pervasive the disease already had become, even in February. And I was listening, of course, to my health leadership. And the goal was to not say to people that we had reached a point for shutting down our society, but trying to strike a balance, trying to address the cases we had and get people to do the precautions that our health team thought were important at the time. Unfortunately, within a few days, it became clear we were in a whole different situation. And that's when I started calling for shelter in place. And you accurately portrayed that, unfortunately, I had to fight with our state's governor, but that's what we needed to do. The moment it was clear to me we needed to have shelter in place – if we had implemented that right then, if New York City had had that power, that would have been the difference-maker. And I only wish we had had a very different situation then that would have allowed me to do that.  

Hasan: A lot of people at the time said the rivalry between you and then-Governor Andrew Cuomo cost New Yorker's lives. Do you accept that even if you put the blame on him, not yourself? But do you accept the politics of that time definitely did cost lives?  

Mayor: You know, I don't think it's productive to relitigate. I think what's clear is – and I want to be fair, even to Andrew Cuomo, you can imagine, that's a tough statement for me to say. In the end, it is a global pandemic. We had no national leadership. We did not have testing. We had misinformation coming out of the White House. We were dealing with the great unknown, even our best scientists and health care leaders here in New York City only had very initial knowledge about the disease. We have to put all that in perspective. We can do a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking, but I think what's clear now – what's clear now is that once it became clear the details and the facts, we had to be very aggressive. And here, and around the country, the answer was to do things like shelter in place. We finally got there, but now we have a situation that's so much clearer. And that's what's shocking, that around the country there isn't a devotion to vaccination. We're 100 percent devoted to it. And that's why New York City actually is coming back and living the life we're living right now. 

Hasan: Undeniably true. Let me ask you about Andrew Cuomo though, the former governor. Did you know – had you heard rumors about Andrew Cuomo and his alleged misconduct around women? Because a lot of people in New York say this was known and it was kind of just – people turned a blind eye.  

Mayor: Well, I was focused on his misconduct when it came to nursing homes, which was profoundly damaging. Obviously, we saw there was misconduct literally around the distribution of testing and vaccinations and political favoritism there. I was honestly focused on the context of COVID and the damage that was being done. When we started to hear individual stories, they were terrifying, that these women had been put through this. And I give all the credit in the world to the women who came forward, taking the immense risk, because they finally shocked a lot of people in this state who had looked the other way on Andrew Cuomo into realizing exactly who he was. 

Hasan: And I understand where your focus was, but I'm going ask you again, because you didn't quite answer the question. You were unaware of any of those women's stories before they came forward. You had no idea?  

Mayor: Of the specific stories? No, of course. Anyone who was should have come forward with them. I didn't know about those, but I was deeply concerned about a host of other problems. And they're all – they're all true. This is the reality, Mehdi – all these things, all these mistakes, all these sins, all these horrible actions happened simultaneously. And they're only now just beginning to be unpacked. And I'll tell you, the investigators and the prosecutors have a lot to work with and you can expect a lot more chapters in this story. 

Hasan: You've said the Andrew Cuomo is a tyrant. You said that he should be criminally charged. Do you believe that he will be? Some of some might say, Americans tend not to put such powerful people behind bars.  

Mayor: I think there's a mixed bag on that area, but in New York State, we've certainly seen a lot of powerful people go to jail who richly deserved to. There's a number of places where he may be prosecuted. So, I don't rule it out at all.  

Hasan: One last question, Mr. Mayor. The next mayor of New York, if it's a Democrat, will be Eric Adams, former police officer, former Republican. You've endorsed him. He and many around him say his victory in the primaries is a victory for moderates and a rejection of woke progressives. How does that make you feel as a self-professed progressive man? Was his win a defeat for the left of your party, which you have long identified with?  

Mayor: Yeah, I don't accept the analysis. Eric Adams was a profound activist fighting against improper police practices from within the Police Department, doing extraordinary work on civil rights decades ago. And he is a working class guy from Brooklyn who represents the interests of working people. I've worked with him very closely and a lot of the most progressive initiatives of this administration. I don't accept that simplification. I think you're going to see a continuity with a lot of the progressive policies that we created over the last eight years. 

Hasan: I hope you're right. Although, some of that analysis comes from him and people around them, not from me. But Mayor Bill de Blasio, I appreciate you taking time out and taking my questions. Thank you.  

Mayor: Thank you. 

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