New York City and California to Require Vaccines or Tests for Workers

California and New York City announced the mandates for their employees, while the Department of Veterans Affairs said frontline health care workers must get vaccinated or face possible termination.

The push to mandate coronavirus vaccinations amid sharply rising caseloads nationwide accelerated on Monday, as the country’s most populous state and its largest city both announced that they would require hundreds of thousands of government workers to get inoculations or face weekly testing. At the same time, the Department of Veterans Affairs became the first federal agency to require such vaccinations, by announcing that all 115,000 of its frontline health care workers must receive a coronavirus inoculation in the next two months or face possible termination. The actions by Gov. Gavin Newsom in California and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City reflected growing concern among many government officials that vaccine skepticism and the spread of the more contagious Delta variant could lead to a new wave of the pandemic. Their orders would cover hundreds of thousands of government employees and, in the case of California, the more than two million health care workers in private and public hospitals, nursing homes and other congregate-care facilities, according to the state Department of Public Health.