Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would run out of doses by next week.
After a sluggish first month, the pace of coronavirus vaccinations is accelerating to the point that New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week, officials said on Friday, causing several health facilities to alter their immediate inoculation plans.
On Thursday, Mount Sinai Health System, one of the city’s largest hospital networks, canceled many upcoming vaccination appointments for older patients, saying the doses it had anticipated receiving were no longer likely to arrive.
Northwell Health, the largest health provider in the state, said it had mostly stopped scheduling additional appointments for the next several days given its limited supply.
Around New York, officials in at least one county said they had only enough doses to last through the weekend, echoing a similar sentiment by city officials.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday on Brian Lehrer’s radio show that New York City would run out of doses by next week.
“It makes no sense that we’re being starved of the capacity we need,” the mayor said.
State officials warned this week that they were growing increasingly worried about the supply, pleading with federal officials to increase the number of doses they send every week. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has said the state receives only about 300,000 doses per week, although he indicated on Friday that the state had been told its weekly supply would be sliced to 250,000. About 100,000 of them go to New York City, Mr. de Blasio said on Friday.
Across the country, governors have expressed similar frustrations and made similar requests in the wake of federal health officials recommending that anyone over 65 be eligible for vaccination — making tens of millions more people eligible.
This week, federal officials indicated that more doses from a stockpile would be sent to states. But they have since clarified that the batch is actually from a tranche saved for second doses. (People are considered fully vaccinated after receiving two doses.)
Until recently, New York City had been struggling to quickly administer vaccines, leading to a backlog of doses. But in recent days, the pace of vaccinations has picked up drastically because of expanded eligibility and because many new vaccination sites have opened over the last week.
But as those new sites opened, the supply of doses that had been directed to some hospitals appeared to diminish. Many hospitals had only recently begun vaccinating their patients.
As of early Friday, New York City reported having received 800,500 doses, of which 337,518 vaccines had been administered. But about 100,000 of the received doses were earmarked for nursing homes, city officials said, and about 200,000 were set to be used as second doses.
So, the actual number of available doses for people being vaccinated for the first time is less.
And the city has been increasing its daily vaccination rate. From Monday through Thursday of this week, the city administered nearly 120,000 doses.
“The increasing problem now is there is not enough supply of vaccine to keep up with the first appointments, let alone the second appointments,” Mr. de Blasio said on Friday.
Statewide, about 700,000 doses have been administered, according to Mr. Cuomo’s office, amounting to 75 percent of the doses received thus far from the federal government.
For the first month of the rollout in New York, Mr. Cuomo limited eligibility largely to health care workers and nursing home residents, and imposed a thicket of regulations that led vaccinations to proceed more slowly than expected. Many doses sat unused in freezers for weeks. Under pressure to speed things up, Mr. Cuomo relented, opening eligibility to large categories of public sector employees, essential workers and anyone over 65. Within days, the number of eligible New Yorkers had more than doubled.
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Answers to Your Vaccine Questions
While the exact order of vaccine recipients may vary by state, most will likely put medical workers and residents of long-term care facilities first. If you want to understand how this decision is getting made, this article will help.
Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months. The unvaccinated majority will still remain vulnerable to getting infected. A growing number of coronavirus vaccines are showing robust protection against becoming sick. But it’s also possible for people to spread the virus without even knowing they’re infected because they experience only mild symptoms or none at all. Scientists don’t yet know if the vaccines also block the transmission of the coronavirus. So for the time being, even vaccinated people will need to wear masks, avoid indoor crowds, and so on. Once enough people get vaccinated, it will become very difficult for the coronavirus to find vulnerable people to infect. Depending on how quickly we as a society achieve that goal, life might start approaching something like normal by the fall 2021.
Yes, but not forever. The two vaccines that will potentially get authorized this month clearly protect people from getting sick with Covid-19. But the clinical trials that delivered these results were not designed to determine whether vaccinated people could still spread the coronavirus without developing symptoms. That remains a possibility. We know that people who are naturally infected by the coronavirus can spread it while they’re not experiencing any cough or other symptoms. Researchers will be intensely studying this question as the vaccines roll out. In the meantime, even vaccinated people will need to think of themselves as possible spreaders.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is delivered as a shot in the arm, like other typical vaccines. The injection won’t be any different from ones you’ve gotten before. Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems. But some of them have felt short-lived discomfort, including aches and flu-like symptoms that typically last a day. It’s possible that people may need to plan to take a day off work or school after the second shot. While these experiences aren’t pleasant, they are a good sign: they are the result of your own immune system encountering the vaccine and mounting a potent response that will provide long-lasting immunity.
No. The vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer use a genetic molecule to prime the immune system. That molecule, known as mRNA, is eventually destroyed by the body. The mRNA is packaged in an oily bubble that can fuse to a cell, allowing the molecule to slip in. The cell uses the mRNA to make proteins from the coronavirus, which can stimulate the immune system. At any moment, each of our cells may contain hundreds of thousands of mRNA molecules, which they produce in order to make proteins of their own. Once those proteins are made, our cells then shred the mRNA with special enzymes. The mRNA molecules our cells make can only survive a matter of minutes. The mRNA in vaccines is engineered to withstand the cell's enzymes a bit longer, so that the cells can make extra virus proteins and prompt a stronger immune response. But the mRNA can only last for a few days at most before they are destroyed.
There was not enough vaccine for most of them. Mr. Cuomo on Friday again blamed the federal government for its slow delivery of vaccines, adding that the Trump administration’s recommendation to expand eligibility had exacerbated frustrations and shortages.
“They increased the eligibility,” the governor said. “They did not increase the supply.”
Officials in the state also say that they are uncertain how many doses will be available week to week. Mark Poloncarz, the Democrat who serves as county executive in Erie County, which encompasses Buffalo, the state’s second largest city, said on Thursday that the county had received about 7,500 doses from the state last week and about 5,300 this week, including a batch from an area hospital.
“All of this has to do with New York State getting a limited supply of doses from the federal government,” he said, adding that, “I have much more demand, and much more capability to deliver doses, than what we’re receiving at this time.”
Erie County is running two vaccination sites, doing about 1,500 inoculations a day. But vaccine is running out fast. “I’ve got enough doses to get me through Saturday,” he said, “maybe the beginning of Monday.”
Mr. Poloncarz added that he did not even know how many people in the county had gotten a shot. “It’s really kind of maddening,” he said.
More than a month into the vaccine rollout, there is still little clarity on the best way to schedule an appointment. New Yorkers are seeking appointments with their doctors, pharmacies, health departments and local hospitals in search of a vaccination slot.
Charles King, the executive director of Housing Works, said his organization — which serves homeless New Yorkers and those affected by H.I.V. — used up its available doses more than a week ago, after being given a deadline by the state. But since then, he has not received any additional doses for patients who need their first shot, and has not been told when he will. “I’m sitting here outraged that I can’t get ahold of vaccine,” he said.
Amid the uncertainty and disorganization, there have been moments when the rollout feels like a free-for-all. On Thursday night in southern Brooklyn, throngs of New Yorkers had to be turned back by city officials after gathering at one of the city’s main vaccination points, lured by rumors that hundreds of doses were being administered on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Separate state and city websites directed countless New Yorkers to clinics and other facilities that had no available appointments. Many people have spent hours trying to navigate appointment scheduling systems with little luck. The state’s system has at times crashed, leading some county health officials to use spreadsheets to keep track of appointments.
But even people who have made appointments are learning that it does not guarantee them a vaccination.
“I don’t know what’s worse: Not to get an appointment? Or to get an appointment, feel relief, and have it canceled and now know that you’re at the end of a really long line,” said S.J. Avery, 74, a Brooklyn resident who described feeling frustrated and angry after Mount Sinai canceled her appointment. “It’s adding anxiety to the anxiety I’ve been feeling since March.”
To some degree, it is little surprise that people are struggling to get appointments. About 2.5 million residents of New York City — or close to 40 percent of the city’s adult population — are currently eligible to receive the vaccine. On Friday, Mayor de Blasio said the city had “under 186,000 first doses remaining.”
Stephen Levin, a city councilman in Brooklyn, said the vaccine rollout had been plagued by disorganization and a dysfunctional relationship between Albany and City Hall. But he acknowledged that those problems were being dwarfed by a bigger reality.
“A lot of this does came back to legitimate shortage of vaccine,” Mr. Levin, a Democrat, said, though he added that government needed to better communicate that even though people were eligible, they might still have to wait some time.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has allocated enough doses to New York City next week to cover the second shots of people scheduled for follow-up appointments, plus slightly under 110,000 additional doses.
The current 30,000 doses administered per day is unsustainable without more vaccine. “We’ve had a backlog that is floating us this week,” said Mark Levine, a Democrat who is chairman of the City Council’s Health Committee, adding: “You do the math. We’re going to have a citywide shortage.”
There are growing concerns that New Yorkers with more resources, better computer literacy and reliable internet access will have an advantage in scheduling an appointment.
“The most vulnerable people are going to get crowded out,” Mr. Levine said.
Mr. Cuomo has pledged that Black and Latino people, who have died of Covid-19 at higher rates than white people, will not be left behind. And Mr. de Blasio has spoken of prioritizing residents in hard-hit minority neighborhoods and public housing for receiving the vaccine.
But some public health experts are worried that the disorganized expansion of the vaccine program and the limited supply will undermine those equity goals.
Nina Schwalbe, who has held senior positions at Unicef and the public-private health partnership known as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, noted that the state decided to open a major vaccination site at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side, far from minority neighborhoods.
“I think what’s going to happen is basically the ship is sinking, so run to the lifeboat and the first people who get there are in that boat, and sorry for the people who didn’t get their vaccine,” she said. “So my worry is, we’ll vaccinate healthy people, we’ll vaccinate the middle and upper income white people, and we’re not going to vaccinate Black and brown populations.”
Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.
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