No end in sight for New Jersey facemask mandate as nearly half of adults fully vaccinated

by Robert Walker

While nearly half of the 6 million adult population in New Jersey is fully vaccinated, with a goal of two-thirds by July, Governor Phil Murphy says he’s not ending the state’s facemask mandate any time soon. He also was mum on when businesses will be allowed to fully re-open.

When asked if New Jersey will follow the lead of other states and countries which have backed off on facemask mandates and outdoor face mask wearing, Murphy said, “We’re not there yet.”

We may never ‘be there’.

“I mean, if you look at every metric, they’ve done an extraordinary job, particularly most recently in vaccinating. But we’re not there yet on changing our mask mandates,” Murphy said. “I hope we will be. But it’s, you know, first of all, it’s a much warmer weather country than we are a state right now. So they can live — I’ve been there a bunch of times, I can tell you right now in mid-to-late April, they are outdoors in a big way, and we’re not quite there yet. And we also have a rate of transmission that is much higher than in Israel right now. But I would hope we’d get there. I just can’t tell you when.”


So far, 2,507,736 adults in New Jersey have been fully vaccinated and another 1 million have received their first dose, according to the Department of Health.

More than half of the state’s adult population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

“We know that’s now over 6 million shots in the arms, by the way, so we know that we are ready to keep pushing forward. With a total this morning of 2,507,736 fully vaccinated individuals, we are now well more than halfway to our initial goal of 4.7 million folks by the end of June,” Murphy said.

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