CUO 'SHOT' DOWN
Ignored counties' mass-vax plans: leaders
New York county-government leaders say Gov. Cuomo ignored their own years-in-themaking mass-vaccination plans — and is now stonewalling their ability to get the shots out fast.
“We can get vaccines in the arms of people in a safe, efficient way, but instead it’s a convoluted, disorganized mess for no reason at all,” Republican Dutchess County Executive and New York State County Executives president Marc Molinaro told The Post Wednesday.
“We’ve got to go at lightning speed. There isn’t anyone in America who didn’t know sometime in this crisis that we would have a vaccine. They didn’t even activate the base infrastructure, and we don’t know why,” he said of state leaders, Cuomo and Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, arguing the state’s roughly 300,000 vaccines administered over the last three weeks is anemic and unacceptable.
Molinaro and other county leaders are also frustrated that the state’s eligibility list for those who can get the shots is so limited and should be opened up to all first responders like police and firefighters as well as those 75 and older as soon as possible.
County governments are required by the state’s publichealth law to annually develop and submit vaccination plans to the state, including details like community points of dispensation, practice drills and administration protocols directly connected to local health networks.
They annually administer flu shots, and in the context of the pandemic have coordinated COVID-19 testing, contact tracing and other enforcement activities.
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi defended the state’s actions.
“We need to coordinate their plans in a way that fits with the state’s efforts, so we don’t have 62 different counties going off 62 different plans. In the beginning it made sense to vaccinate frontline health-care workers where they worked in the hospitals,” he said.
“As we continue to make the vaccine available to more and more New Yorkers, we have 46 county health departments that are ready to be set up within the next two weeks. It’s all hands on deck.”
Meanwhile, the Cuomo administration has refused to provide updated vaccine administration and distribution information on a daily basis — but according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of Wednesday at 9 a.m. New York has administered 311,797 first doses of two-dose vaccines — which comes out to 1,603 shots per 100,000 New Yorkers.