Gimme a pop with that shot!
Yang says ice cream trucks, bars could be vaccine sites
Vaccines could come with a creamsicle in Andrew Yang’s New York.
The mayoral contender on Friday rolled out a public health plan for the city that includes tapping bars, night clubs and ice cream trucks as vaccination sites.
“We need to be more creative about trying to get the vaccine closer to people,” Yang said Friday at a virtual press briefing. “Right now, there are some underutilized resources that we may be able to take advantage of.”
Yang, who ran for president in the last Democratic primary, singled out ice cream trucks as well as bars, restaurants and night clubs because they all utilize refrigeration, a necessity for storing the two COVID-19 vaccines now available to the public.
While the idea may seem far out, it appears to be along the lines of something the city may have already considered.
Jackie Bray, deputy executive director of the city’s Test and Trace
Corps, tweeted last month that using refrigerated Dippin’ Dots machines for vaccine distribution was an idea she became “obsessed with” after learning the machines are cold enough to store the Pfizer vaccine.
Using such methods would not be “the first move” under his plan though; Yang noted that pharmacies, hospitals and community centers would take priority when it comes to distribution.
The point of the secondary options, he said, is to be able to provide vaccinations in areas where people may have trouble traveling to existing vaccination sites.
Venue owners — many of whom have had to close their businesses due to COVID — would also benefit from rental fees paid out by the city, Yang said.
Yang, who immediately became a potential frontrunner after joining the crowded race for mayor last week, is also floating the idea of creating a new city portal for tracking and administering COVID shots — a timely topic given concerns about how difficult it’s been to set up appointments.
During his briefing on Zoom, he described the city’s healthcare options as among the best in the world, but said the overall network of public and private hospitals as well as urgent care providers is ultimately “fragmented,” as evidenced in the lack of an integrated, city-managed portal to track vaccination data.
“These systems are not designed to communicate with each other, which in this time is actually mission-critical,” he said. “In an emergency, having information is the difference between life and death, and right now the information that New Yorkers are getting is incomplete.”
Whoever wins the mayoral race will be sworn in on Jan. 1, 2022 — a point at which at least some of the issues Yang raised might be moot.
Asked about this in a separate interview with the Daily News, Yang said he hopes that’s the case, but added that a vaccination portal and database, integrated across different parts of the city’s healthcare framework, would remain necessary both to track who’s been vaccinated and for future health crises.
Such a system, Yang added, will be needed to provide proof of vaccination as the city begins to open up more.