New York City plans to run out of its coronavirus vaccine supply on Thursday, and will then have to cancel inoculation appointments at many of the city’s inoculation sites, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“We will literally have nothing more to give from Friday,” de Blasio said at a press conference on Tuesday.
New York City received 53,000 doses this week, the mayor said, and had a total of 116,000 doses in inventory as of Tuesday morning. But Mr de Blasio said that was not enough to keep up with the rate at which New Yorkers are being vaccinated. The mayor, who raised concerns last week over a shortage of coronavirus vaccines after an initially slow rollout, said the city is currently not expected to receive any more doses until next Tuesday.
Mr. de Blasio and Governor Andrew M. Cuomo have urged the federal government to send more vaccines to New York City, now that the state’s eligibility pool has been expanded to include anyone 65 years of age or older.
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Statewide, more than 835,000 people have received the first of two doses of a vaccine – the two federally licensed vaccines are two-dose vaccines – and nearly 84,000 have received the second dose, Mr. Cuomo in a statement Tuesday. Even so, pressure is mounting to speed up vaccinations as statewide hospitalizations overtake the state 9,000, Cuomo said Tuesday, for the first time since early May.
The supply problem threatens the success of the mass vaccination sites that the city has set up in each of the five boroughs, said de Blasio. The sites of CitiField, the Mets Stadium in Queens, and Empire Outlets in Staten Island are slated to open next week. “This is not the way it should be,” the mayor said. “We have the capacity to vaccinate a large number of people. We need the vaccine to go with it. “
The city’s immunization program has encountered several obstacles since eligibility was expanded. Buggy websites and complex registration systems have made it difficult for many New Yorkers to make appointments. Mr de Blasio said the city expects to have vaccinated 500,000 people by the end of Wednesday. The city had previously set a goal of one million doses by the end of January.
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