New York State will have exhausted its stocks of Covid-19 vaccines on Friday, its Governor Andrew Cuomo warned, urging the Biden government to speed up deliveries.
“New York State will have used all its first doses today,” or about a million doses, tweeted the governor, a Democrat close to Joe Biden.
While waiting for a replenishment planned “in the week”, he called on the vaccination sites of this state of 20 million inhabitants to make appointments only if they are sure to have the corresponding deliveries.
For more than a week, the governor has sounded the alarm, calling on the federal government to step up the pace of its deliveries.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has also called on the new federal government for help.
More than 500,000 people – out of 8 million inhabitants – have been vaccinated to date in the first American metropolis, he wrote on Friday in a letter addressed to the new American president and made public.
Just as the number of eligible people increased, “stocks melted,” he explained.
The city has increased the number of sites to be vaccinated and hopes to reach a rate of 500,000 vaccinations per week, but “we are now in the process of canceling the appointments made for this weekend and the beginning of the week. next, pending new deliveries, ”added the mayor.
The appeals of these two elected Democrats come to reinforce the pressure on the Biden government, which signed on its first full day in the White House a series of decrees supposed to intensify the fight against the pandemic and to accelerate the campaigns of vaccination as of screening .
Experts believe, however, that the new government will find it difficult to speed up deliveries given the still limited manufacturing capacities for the only two vaccines already authorized in the United States, those of Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna.
Some say Joe Biden’s vaccination target – 100 million vaccinations in 100 days – is too low.
The coronavirus has already killed more than 410,000 in the United States, the country most bereaved by the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Joe Biden estimated Friday that it was to be expected that the death toll “reached much more than 600,000 dead”, a figure he had never mentioned before.
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