Adams ‘getting vaccines out the door’ in a hurry
With the next shipment of monkeypox vaccines delayed for at least two months, Mayor Adams said Thursday there’s not much he can do about it aside from getting the vaccines the city does have to those who need them as quickly as possible.
Adams was responding Tuesday to questions about the city’s monkeypox plan, given the federal government’s expectation that the next shipment of vaccines won’t arrive until October.
He conceded that production and delivery of the vaccine are “beyond my scope” and again bemoaned what he called “a real supply issue.”
“The federal government is not going to allow us to order more until we get the ones that we have out the door,” he said. “We are expanding the sites where you can get them, and we’re getting the vaccines out the door.”
The city has so far received 79,000 doses of the vaccine — out of the approximately 131,000 doses that have been allocated to it, according to Adams’ spokeswoman Kate Smart.
The city will begin booking new vaccine appointments on Thursday at 6 p.m. So far in the Big Apple, 1,630 people have tested positive for the disease, and on Thursday, President Biden declared the disease a national health emergency.
The federal government is now in the process of distributing 1.1 million doses of the vaccine, but as the New York Times first reported on Wednesday, it doesn’t expect another delivery until October. That delivery represents another 500,000 doses.
So far in New York, monkeypox is primarily infecting sexually active gay and bisexual men, as well as transgender people, according to the city Health Department. Symptoms include rashes and sores, sore throat and fever.
On its website, the Health Department is also advising that people reduce their number of sexual partners and “avoid sex parties, circuit parties and other spaces where people are having sex and other intimate contacts with multiple people. This may reduce spread from contact with the rash or sores, but other methods of transmission may still be possible.”