To support his family after losing his city government job in December 2021 for declining to get a COVID-19 vaccine, Frank Schimenti reluctantly sold the van that he had bought five years earlier to transport his son, Giovanni.
The teenager, who had multiple disabilities, was in and out of the hospital throughout 2020 — during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City — and passed away that December at the age of 17 from issues unrelated to the virus. Schimenti, an assistant chief plan examiner and project advocate for the city’s Department of Buildings, worked for the agency for 22 years, including remotely from home for 18 months during the pandemic — the same stretch when Giovanni spent months at a time at a local Staten Island hospital.
A year after Giovanni’s death, in December 2021, the Department of Buildings put Schimenti on unpaid leave. He was terminated two months later. Schimenti had requested and been denied a religious exemption to the city government’s requirement that all employees get vaccinated against COVID, with two shots of Pfizer or Moderna, or the equivalent. Since former Mayor Bill de Blasio first instituted the mandate in October 2021, over 12,000 workers have sought religious or medical exemptions