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An appeal to prioritize public transit workers for COVID-19 vaccinations was made Wednesday by Valley Transportation Authority General Manager and CEO Nuria Fernandez in a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Transit workers are a lifeline serving other essential workers, the elderly and those with disabilities at a critical time, Fernandez said, adding that “surveys show passengers are overwhelmingly low-income earners and people of color, many who are essential workers themselves.”
She noted that VTA makes 33,000 trips a day.
“Given the clear societal, economic and equity benefits of the services public transit workers provide, we believe it would be a significant mistake for the state to fail to include public transit workers in Phase 1B of the state’s vaccine distribution plan,” Fernandez writes.
Phase 1A of the vaccine distribution plan is now in effect and includes health care workers and employees and residents of long-term care facilities, starting with nursing homes, according to the plan. Phase 1B is set to vaccinate front-line essential workers and people over 75, but there is still some debate over which categories of essential workers should be first in line for the vaccine.
“Bay City News Service” provided this article. Evidently, it just reports on a letter attributed to the VTA General Manager Nuria Fernandez. It refer to her as “he.” Many VTA employees are paid lots of money – unaffected by the lack of customers. Taking a bus amid the pandemic is dumb. Buses and light rail should not be operated at all. Vaccinating drivers will be immunize passengers. The GM has a compensation package of $375,000 per year. See TransparentCalifornia.com. She has threatened to use almost all of the VTA’s Measure B income for capital projects on extending BART in San Jose. How many fat cat bureaucrats at VTA have already been vaccinated? That could be a more telling news piece.
The typically empty VTA buses and trains have got to be among the the safest of places during the pandemic.