New York City could run out of Covid-19 vaccine doses by Thursday, warned Mayor Bill de Blasio, which could force the city to cancel vaccination appointments.
“We will have literally nothing left to give as of Friday,” Mr de Blasio said. “What does that mean? It means that if we do not get more vaccine quickly, a new supply of vaccine, we will have to cancel appointments and no longer give shots after Thursday for the reminder of the week at a lot of our sites.”
The warning came during the mayor’s coronavirus press briefing.
Last week the city administered 220,00 vaccine doses after eligibility opened up to include more residents and more vaccination sites were created. In total, 455,737 vaccine doses have been administered.
Now the only had about 92,000 doses left to give out to recipients, meaning the city would quickly run out by the end of the week.
“As of yesterday, we were vaccinating New Yorkers at the rate of three New Yorkers per second,” Mr de Blasio told CNN on Monday. “The fact is we plan this week to do hundreds of thousands of doses … we need a massive re-supply.»
Mr de Blasio announced earlier in the year that he wanted to do one million doses in the month of January for residents, but that could be a problem if the city doesn’t receive enough allotment each week from the federal government.
“I don’t have enough vaccine to keep up with the demand or our ability to give the doses,” he said.
The city could be forced to close some of its 125 vaccination sites due to inability to give out doses after it worked to create enough centres to address the need.
This comes after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo request to purchase vaccine doses directly from Pfizer, a Manhattan-based pharmacy company. He claimed the federal government was not providing the state vaccine doses fast enough, leading to a shortage.
The federal government was sending 250,000 doses to New York this week, Mr Cuomo said, which was 50,000 less than what the state received last week.
