NYC’S NEEDLE IS ON ‘EMPTY’

City poised to run out of shots ‘by end of next week’: Blasio

Mayor de Blasio sounded the alarm on Friday that the city is set to run out of COVID-19 vaccine by next week.

“I’m telling you, at this rate, there will not be any doses in the city of New York by the end of next week if we don’t get a major resupply,” de Blasio said during his weekly guest spot on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.”

Hizzoner explained that the city has been getting a resupply of “a very paltry” 100,000 doses per week, and that the city went through 125,000 shots “in the first four days of this week.”

“Our numbers are increasing every day of how many people we can vaccinate,” de Blasio said, noting that nearly 34,000 people were inoculated in the city on Wednesday.

“If we don’t get a serious supply, we’re going to have to stop taking appointments, just as happened at Mount Sinai Hospital and NYU-Langone,” de Blasio said. “If there’s no supply, we’re going to have to freeze the appointment system. That would be insane.”

Two of the city’s largest hospital systems — NYU-Langone and Mount Sinai — have stopped booking vaccine appointments for the time being, and all systems are expected to run out of vaccine by the end of next week without a resupply, according to the Mayor’s Office.

Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital was forced to turn away those seeking to get jabbed this week even though people had appointments to receive the shot.

Gov. Cuomo, speaking later on Friday during his own press briefing, explained that 7 million New Yorkers are now eligible to receive the vaccine, but that there is a backlog due to inadequate supply, since the state receives only about 300,000 doses per week from the federal government.

“It’s like opening a floodgate and putting it through a syringe,” Cuomo said.

He added that the state received a lesser amount of 250,000 shots this week. At that rate, it will take six months to vaccinate all those currently eligible, the governor said.

“Seven million people chasing 250,000 doses,” Cuomo said. “That’s the mathematical problem you can’t solve.”

Out of the 827,715 doses administered statewide, 731,285 of them were first doses, while 96,430 of them were second doses of the two-dose vaccine, Cuomo said, citing state data.

Cuomo said anyone who had received their first dose should not be “worried” about not being able to get their second, even though supply is limited.

“We make sure we have a second dose for whoever got the first dose,” he said.

Commenting on de Blasio’s warning that New York City was on track to run out of vaccine supply, Cuomo said: “I don’t know exactly what the mayor was talking about . . . Some facilities are working through their past supply.”

“Many New York City facilities have [vaccine] allocation unused,” Cuomo said.

The governor added that New York City would receive more doses next week, “but it will be less because the overall allocation is less.”

City data as of Friday show that out of 800,500 doses delivered in the Big Apple so far, 337,518 — about 42 percent — have gone into people’s arms.

The city has administered 71.3 percent of the 175,000 vaccines it aimed to distribute by the end of this weekend, according to the Mayor’s Office, which said that as of Friday, the city had fewer than 186,000 first doses remaining.