The Issue: Mayor Adams’ decision to carve out a vaccine mandate exemption for athletes and performers.

So Mayor Adams is lifting all mandates for professional athletes (“Play ball!” March 25).

Proving he is just another hypocritical politician, his volte-face regarding athlete mandates was swift when billionaire team owners came calling — but firefighters, cops and other municipal and private sector workers get a collective middle finger from Adams.

It’s easy to lead from the front when the rich and powerful are behind you, but the poor, everyday working man or woman, well, they’ll just have to fend for themselves.

James McCaffrey

Yonkers

While it’s bad enough for Mayor Adams to offer the carve-out, shame on any of the players or artists who accept such a grant of privilege.

Especially those such as Kyrie Irving, who claimed his actions were supporting those losing their jobs due to mandates.

The real fans and heroes are the everyday people as well as the nurses, first responders and other city workers. What a disgusting slap in the face to them.

Brian Sullivan

Rockaway Beach

Adams is making sports players and performers exempt from vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, many in the NYPD and FDNY as well as teachers have been fired for not being vaccinated.

In my opinion, this is a double standard. The mayor is being a hypocrite. Why are only the rich and the famous getting exemptions?

Our police and firefighters protect us from harm, and our teachers educate our children and are extremely essential to our well-being. Shame on the mayor. This is not right.

Frederick Bedell

Bellerose

Well, now we know where Adams’ real priorities are: in the special suites or box seats in our athletic stadiums or buildings.

Unvaccinated athletes can play and possibly infect their whole team or spectators, no problem. But police, fire, sanitation and health-care workers cannot work unless they are vaccinated. Talk about hypocrisy.

Kim Cody

Whitestone

Adams is going to lift the COVID vaccine restrictions for athletes and performers. This gives rise to a great inequity.

Employees are still fired under the mandate requiring workers to be vaccinated.

These workers placed their lives on the line, working when there was no vaccine. Yet the rules are being changed for highly paid athletes who sat out the height of COVID.

Karen Snyder

Rego Park

Who would have thought New York could get someone just as bad as, if not worse than, Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Adams is clueless. He’s allowing pro athletes, vaxxed or not, to play, yet the average worker who was fired is screwed. New York is never going to be back, unfortunately.

Steven DelGaudio

Edgewater, NJ

Up to this point, I have given Adams the benefit of the doubt. But this awful double-standard decision can haunt his mayoralty.

We can’t have one rule for one group and a different rule for another. It can only divide us even more than we are now.

We were never in this all together. There are working people who lost their livelihoods for exercising a choice. Some of these workers were serenaded with the banging of pots and pans for showing up during the lockdown.

If Mayor Adams wants to show true courage and leadership, he should revisit this issue now and lift the vax mandate for everybody.

Tony Giametta

Oceanside

Adams lets professional athletes rule the roost.

Unvaccinated sports stars, who have been kowtowed to all their lives, are now eligible to play. Adams had the opportunity to make a goal-line stand and caved.

Why, you ask? Yankees President Randy Levine and Mets President Sandy Alderson cried that stars such as Aaron Judge, Anthony Rizzo, Jacob deGrom or Pete Alonso might be unable to play home games.

Alan Swartz

Verona, NJ

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