NEW YORK (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 16th January, 2021) New York City will run out of COVID-19 vaccines by next week unless the Federal government and others in the supply chain dramatically change their approach to meet demand, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Friday.
"Since a month ago when we got the vaccines, some 300,000 New Yorkers have been vaccinated and this number is going up very quickly," de Blasio told the WNYC radio station in an interview. "At the rate we're going, there will not be any doses left in the city of New York by the end of next week. That would be insane after all the progress has been made setting up a system, so people could actually get appointments."
Mount Sinai Hospital and NYU Langone Health are at least two medical centers in New York City that have already stopped taking appointments for coronavirus vaccinations, de Blasio said.
"We've been getting resupply right now at a very paltry level of about a 100,000 doses a week. I am telling you that we went through a 125,000 in the first four days of this week. We will run out of vaccines by next week in New York City if there's not a very different approach from the federal government, Albany and the vaccine makers," he said.
Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the two coronavirus vaccine makers whose doses have so far been authorized by world health bodies for emergency distribution, have reported manufacturing challenges after initially promising hundreds of millions of shots in 2021. Both companies have COVID-19 vaccines that need deep-freeze storage conditions and require at least two doses per person to be effective.
Johnson & Johnson, which has developed a one-dose vaccine that does not need deep freezing conditions, says it was working on bringing less than 10 million doses to the market by the second-half of February.
The logistics for vaccine supply have so far been coordinated by the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed program, with each state capital � in New York state's case, Albany � responsible for their own on-ground distribution.
