New York City expects to exhaust its supply of coronavirus vaccine on Thursday, and will then have to cancel inoculation appointments at many city inoculation sites, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“We will literally have nothing left to give as of Friday,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference Tuesday.
New York City received 53,000 doses this week, the mayor said, and had a total of 116,000 doses in inventory Tuesday morning. But Mr. de Blasio said that was not nearly enough to keep up with the pace at which New Yorkers are being inoculated. The mayor, who raised concerns last week about a coronavirus vaccine shortage after an initially sluggish rollout, said the city is not currently scheduled to receive any more doses until next Tuesday.
Mr. de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo have urged the federal government to send more vaccine to New York, now that the state’s eligibility pool has been expanded to include anyone 65 or older.
Statewide, more than 835,000 people have received the first of the two doses of a vaccine — both federally authorized vaccines are two-dose vaccines — and nearly 84,000 have received the second dose, Mr. Cuomo said in a statement on Tuesday. Even so, pressure is mounting to speed up vaccinations as hospitalizations across the state surpassed 9,000, according to Mr. Cuomo on Tuesday, for the first time since early May.
The supply issue threatens the success of the mass vaccination sites the city has been setting up in each of the five boroughs, Mr. de Blasio said. Sites at CitiField, the Mets’ home stadium in Queens, and at the Empire Outlets shopping center in Staten Island are scheduled to open next week. “This is not the way it should be,” the mayor said. “We have the ability to vaccinate a huge number of people. We need the vaccine to go with it.”
The city’s vaccination program has run into several obstacles since eligibility was expanded. Buggy websites and complex sign-up systems have made it difficult for many New Yorkers to schedule appointments. Mr. de Blasio said the city expects to have vaccinated 500,000 people by the end of Wednesday. The city had previously set a goal of one million doses by the end of January.
