Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and elected leaders have teamed up with famed civil rights attorney Norman Siegel on a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the City of New York demanding it release racial and ethnic data of those who have received the COVID-19 vaccine to date. 

Borough President Adams, who recently joined the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus (BLAC) to call for the City to implement a real-time reporting system for such data, is now demanding the release of the data collected to date to ensure the dosages of the vaccine are administered equitably. During a press briefing this morning, Mayor de Blasio committed to releasing data from the City with an ethnic and racial breakdown of vaccine recipients to date later this week. 

“We cannot afford to wait any longer. For weeks, we have been calling on the City to release the data on who is being vaccinated, to determine if the vaccine is being distributed equitably. Now, a troubling — but predictable — pattern is developing in states that have released the data, showing that Black Americans are falling behind in vaccination rates. We need real-time data on the racial breakdown of those who have been vaccinated, and we need it now. I’m proud to partner with Norman Siegel, a staunch advocate for justice and equality, in demanding the City show us the numbers. It is heartening to hear that Mayor de Blasio has committed to releasing this data as of this morning, but we should have been collecting and reporting it from the start of our vaccination efforts. The longer we wait to get a clear picture of our vaccination rollout, the more we risk making the same mistakes we did in the early days of the pandemic,” said Adams.