Covid is over — if you’re famous and good at sports

New York mayor Eric Adams lifted the vaccine mandate for all of the workers in New York City on Thursday. It was a unifying moment for a city in desperate need of some good news.

Just kidding!

Eric Adams did not lift anything. Instead, Bill De Blasio’s successor offered a group of New Yorkers an exemption from having to take the Covid-19 vaccine.

According to CBS, “New York-based performers and athletes who play for New York’s home teams will be exempt from the city’s vaccination mandate for private businesses.”

This is great news for wealthy Yankees players and insufferable celebrity attendees of this year’s Met Gala. After all, nothing says VIP treatment like being able to make your own medical decisions.

Now for the bad news. The rest of the Big Apple’s hoi polloi will still have to provide proof that they #FollowedTheScience if they want to keep their regular-people jobs.

At a press conference, Adams insisted that this decision was “about putting New York City-based performers on a level playing field.”

If only the new mayor was as big a fan of firefighters and nurses as he is of the Brooklyn Nets, then maybe the rest of New Yorkers would be exempted into getting their freedoms back too.

Alas, the past two years of the pandemic have produced many infuriating situations. In August 2020 Karol Markowicz wrote a piece for this site about how the MTV Video Music Awards were allowed to take place in New York City despite the lockdowns affecting other businesses and events.

“Our restaurants are only allowed to offer outdoor seating and must close at 11 p.m. You cannot go out for drinks, unless you order food as well. Gyms are closed. Movie theaters are closed.  Our schools may not reopen. Funerals must be limited to close family only.”

But that Video Music Awards was only the tip of the iceberg — and New York City is far from the only place where hypocrisy and plexiglass were allowed to run amok.

The examples of powerful wealthy people breaking lockdown rules — from California governor Gavin Newsom’s infamous French Laundry “mistake” to Nancy Pelosi’s hair salon “set-up” — occurred daily.

Each time a politician was caught sans mask or traveling or throwing a sophisticated birthday party, it was a taunting reminder to Americans: these rules are for the little people, not the beautiful people.

Furthermore these gotcha moments exposed that the Fauci groupies weren’t scared of the virus at all. They eagerly enforced the good doctor’s mitigation theater — but it had less to do with health and more to do with control.

So why does Mayor Adams’s recent decree even make headlines? Surely we are all used to this level of hypocrisy by now?

The truth is that Adams’s exemption might be the most explicit, crystallized, government-sanctioned example of the Covid-19 double standards thus far. Mayor Adams is creating a different set of inoculation rules based off where a New Yorker ranks in the social hierarchy. Freedom and bodily autonomy are the latest perks of being part of America’s upper crust.

If you needed more motivation to get rich and famous — this is it! As the inspiring billionaire Kim Kardashian put it: “Get off your ass and work.”