More Coronavirus Vaccines Needed For Health Care Workers: Cuomo

NEW YORK CITY — New York State barely has enough of the coronavirus vaccine for half of its 2.1 million health care workers, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday while repeating calls for the federal government to speed up vaccine supply.

Just 900,000 health care workers across the state have gotten the vaccine, Cuomo said, blaming that number on the federal government's pace of supplying New York with 300,000 doses a week.

"The supply rate is the limiting factor," Cuomo said. "We don’t have enough vaccine to go to all health care workers."

Citing those numbers, Cuomo resisted calls from Mayor Bill de Blasio to approve vaccine distribution for groups other than health care workers.

Cuomo denied that hospitals with low rates of vaccine allocation may be receiving too many doses at once, or that health care workers are refusing to take the vaccine.

Hospitals now face a $100,000 fine and disqualification from future vaccine distribution if they do not distribute vaccine doses within seven days of receiving them.

"I don’t believe hospitals that say only half my workers will take it," Cuomo said Tuesday.

Cuomo said hospitals that have vaccinated all their health care workers should contact the state, which will then retrieve and reallocate remaining doses of the vaccine to essential workers, who are in the next phase of the vaccine rollout.

For now, he said, health care workers remain the primary focus of the vaccine rollout.

“They are [at] the greatest risk, and they are also the greatest threat," Cuomo said.