D.C. City Council to hold emergency vote to reinstate COVID vaccine mandate mayor lifted

The Washington, D.C., City Council is scheduled to hold a special session Friday to vote on a measure to reinstate a recently lifted COVID-19 vaccine mandate in the nation's capital.

The move follows Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser on Tuesday lifting the vaccine mandate for businesses.

Council member Brianne Nadeau, also a Democrat, quickly drafted an emergency bill to reinstate the vaccine requirement. 

The measure – considered emergency legislation – will need nine votes on the 13-member council to pass. 

According to a recent poll, Washingtonians heavily favor the vaccine requirement that Bowser rescinded just one month after it went into effect.

Nadeau argued that the mandate allowed residents to "go out to dinner, to go out for drinks, to go to the movies, to go shopping, because they haven’t had to worry about whether other people in that space are vaccinated." 

Critics point out that 70.9% of the city's population is fully vaccinated and that the virus weekly case rate has reportedly dropped to about 235 per 100,000 residents, from 1,300 per 100,000 residents just before Christmas.

Nadeau said she wants to "eradicate" the virus' highly-contagious Omicron variant before getting rid of the vaccine mandate. 

"But then, we need to prepare for the next variant," she also said. "We just don’t know what’s coming down the road."