New York City limited health workers from giving out all available coronavirus vaccines in hopes of balancing out a supply shortage from last week.
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which oversees the city’s immunization drive, restricted the number of available vaccination appointments across 15 pop-up sites and forbade workers from reaching out to community groups in order to give out more shots, according to a report by New York Magazine’s Intelligencer.
At the George Westinghouse vocational high school site in Brooklyn, only 10 people were signed up to get a shot on Saturday. Workers said normally, hundreds of people are scheduled to get a shot on the weekend. While there were reportedly 650 available doses ready, the day ended with only about 40 people getting vaccinated.
“Last time I did this, I probably vaccinated 70 people,” Sonni Mun, a former physician who volunteers at the site, said. “I vaccinated three people today before I left.”
Mun said that workers were stopped by the Department of Health when they began reaching out to community groups to let people know they had open slots for vaccinations.
“They were very much like, ‘No, we’re not allowed to do that,’” Mun said. “But I get the sense that every pod leader was basically like, we’re getting no direction. We’re screwed. We have hundreds of doses. We have staff here. What are we supposed to do?”
The department said the number of scheduled appointments was kept low to accommodate people who had to reschedule because of several cancellations last week due to a shortage of vaccine doses delivered to the city.
“Our DOHMH sites have been open today to accommodate a limited number of rescheduled appointments from last week,” Patrick Gallahue, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said in a statement. “Supply remains limited and we will use every dose at sites through the weekend.”
Andrew Yang, a New York City mayoral candidate, criticized the report, calling it “bureaucracy at its worst” in a tweet.
“Imagine being a healthcare worker at a vaccination site and vaccinating only 3 people all day – you did 70 the previous time – and then being told you’re not allowed to reach out to patients who want to be vaccinated,” Yang said. “Delays are lethal. This is bureaucracy at its worst.”
So far, about 550,000 residents, or 5.4% of New York City’s population, have been vaccinated. New York state has seen over 1.4 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 43,000 deaths attributed to the virus.
