New York City is set to run out of COVID-19 vaccines by the end of the week — which would force it to start closing its injection sites and cancel appointments, Mayor Bill de Blasio warned Tuesday.
“We are running out of vaccine and we need it desperately,” de Blasio said during a City Hall press briefing. “At the rate we are going, we will begin to run out this Thursday and we will have nothing left to give as of Friday.”
De Blasio said that if the city does not get an infusion of the two-dose coronavirus vaccines from companies Pfizer and Moderna, “we will have to cancel appointments and no longer give shots after Thursday.”
“This is crazy,” Hizzoner declared. “This is not the way it should be.”
The mayor said the city had a “small supply” of 53,000 doses coming this week, leaving just 116,000 doses available until the next shipment. Last week, more than 220,000 doses were administered across the city.
Hizzoner — who has in the past acknowledged the city’s inoculation program got off to a slow and confusing start — blamed the federal government for not sending more to New York, even as it has urged leaders to dramatically expand eligibility for the shots.
“Right now it is up to the federal government,” de Blasio said, noting that he’s “very hopeful” that President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration “is going to fix a lot of this.”
A senior Department of Health and Human Services official insisted to The Post that the federal supply has not slowed down, though acknowledged shipments were larger at the beginning of the rollout when the stockpile was larger.
“States received about a 5% increase in allocations this week from what they have received the past couple weeks, due to liquidation of the previously held ‘safety stock,’” the department said in a statement. “Otherwise, allocations have remained steady the past few weeks.”
The official pointed out that New York state’s own data shows it has far more doses than have been administered.
Big Apple data shows that a total of 876,550 doses have been delivered to New York City as of Tuesday — and 455,737 doses had gone into people’s arms — but city officials said that includes 100,000 shots for the federally-run nursing home vaccination program and 253,000 shots for second doses.
“If we have the vaccine we needed, we could vaccinate 300,000 people this week…the problem is we don’t,” de Blasio said.
During the first three weeks of the vaccination rollout, the state as a whole received roughly 300,000 doses per week from the federal government — but that number has gone down, and this week it is projected to receive 250,400 doses, state officials said Tuesday.
Every week on Tuesday or Wednesday, the state gets a notification from HHS saying how many doses it will get for the week, “then we base our allocations regionally off that,” one state official said.
“It’s a national problem,” the official said. “We have no insight into these production lines.”
On Monday, Gov. Cuomo said he would start trying to reallocate unused doses from the nursing home program into the main pool — and that he had even reached out to Pfizer himself, asking to purchase COVID-19 vaccines directly from the company.
But the pharma giant said it would need federal approval to do so.
And New York City is not the only city sounding the alarm about needing more doses from the feds.
The mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, on Tuesday said the California city is projected to run out of vaccine by Thursday if it does not receive more doses.
The Trump administration had previously aimed to vaccinate 20 million Americans by the end of 2020.
The latest data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 31,161,075 doses have been distributed across the US with 12,279,180 administered.
President-elect Biden has pledged to reach 100 million shots in the first 100 days of his administration, setting up mass vaccination centers and using the Defense Production Act to boost supplies.
On Tuesday, two “mass vaccination” sites in New York City were not exactly living up to the title.
The city-run site at the Brooklyn Army Terminal had reopened after it was forced to shutter last week due to a lack of doses — but within a roughly two-hour span, a Post reporter observed only about 15 people go in to get jabbed.
Meanwhile, at the state-run Javits Center in Manhattan— which, according to officials, has the ability to inoculate 10,000 people within a 12-hour period — just a few hundred were seen going in over the span of three hours.
A 46-year-old Queens woman, who only identified herself as Diana and got jabbed at the site Tuesday, said: “There were like 20 people getting a shot the whole time I was in there, but a lot of empty desks. Hundreds of empty desks.”
Additional reporting by Kevin Sheehan and Reuven Fenton