As New York City’s hospitals rolled out their coronavirus vaccination campaigns with great fanfare, staffers and patients at healthcare centers in the Bronx and Staten Island were left behind.
The James J. Peters VA Hospital in the Bronx was not among the 37 sites that the Department of Veterans Affairs selected to start receiving the Pfizer vaccine when it arrived in New York Monday.
And a VA spokesman could not say when the hospital, which has 431 beds including 120 for nursing home patients, would be on deck to get the shot.
“We expect the Moderna vaccine will be authorized soon, and the facility may receive vaccine doses at that time,” said VA Press Secretary Christina Noel said Friday shortly before the FDA cleared the vaccine.
Noel said the VA selected sites that could “vaccinate large numbers of people and store the vaccines at extremely cold temperatures.”
The Moderna vaccine does not have to be stored in as frigid conditions as the Pfizer shot, which must be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit.
The VA’s Harbor Healthcare System, which operates hospitals in Manhattan and Brooklyn, was among those that started vaccinations Wednesday.
The city’s public hospital system started doling out shots Wednesday at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, which was hard hit during the initial phase of pandemic last spring. Mayor De Blasio was on hand for the televised first jabs to two hospital workers.
But staffers at the system’s Sea View facility on Staten Island — the borough now at the epicenter of the city’s outbreak with a positivity rate of 5.11% as of Thursday — did not get any.
Sea View offers short-term rehabilitation, treatment for traumatic brain injuries and nursing home care.
“We’ll be vaccinating our long-term care staff and residents beginning very shortly,” a spokesman for the Health + Hospitals Corp. said.
He did not provide a timetable. A City Hall spokeswoman later said Seaview staff is expected to get vaccinated in the coming days along with those at other nursing homes.