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Confusion And Mass Cancellations Of Vaccine Appointments In NY As Supply Dwindles
By
Sydney Pereira
Published Jan 24, 2021
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By
Sydney Pereira
Published Jan 24, 2021
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New York City is hundreds of thousands doses away from meeting Mayor Bill de Blasio’s goal to administer 1 million doses by the end of the month.
Vaccine rollout has been plagued with a host of technical issues and rapidly changing eligibility requirements, the latter still leaving behind an untold number of people with pre-existing conditions, who are waiting on state guidance to see if they qualify. Now dwindling supplies from the federal government are impacting distribution. Thousands of appointments for first doses have been rescheduled, and Health + Hospitals is now only booking second shot appointments. Statewide, supplies for first doses are running low as well, Governor Andrew Cuomo said last week.
Mayor de Blasio said Friday there were 65,000 second doses that cannot be administered for two to three more weeks onc reserve. He wants to administer them as a first dose, and wait for additional shipments for second dose appointments in the coming weeks.
“I do believe the federal structure is going to come into gear and produce a lot more, we can back-sell our supply and be ready to give those second doses,” de Blasio said during his weekly "Ask the Mayor" appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show Friday.
As of Sunday morning, the city had 26,293 first doses available to administer, which did not include the federal program for long term care facilities or second doses, according to the NYC Health Department. More doses are anticipated to arrive this week.
But getting an adequate supply of vaccine doses is only half the battle.
Erin O’Brien, a special education teacher from Park Slope, said she had an appointment at the city-run Brooklyn Army Terminal last Saturday—which shuttered last weekend when doses ran out. She had an inkling the appointment might be cancelled, but her MyChart schedule showed she still had a time slot, so she showed up at the site, only to find it closed.
“It was entirely empty. There was no sign saying, ‘Sorry, closed today,’ or ‘Appointments are cancelled,’” O’Brien said. “It was just disappointing.”
That night, she started searching for appointments again and found one at a city-worker site at Staten Island’s Susan Wagner High School.
“I was so bitter on Saturday,” she said. “But then it really did end up being a positive vaccination experience that I felt good about.”
Anna Stern, 72, got an email alert that New York-Presbyterian opened a state site this month at the Fort Washington Armory in Manhattan and immediately logged on to see if there was an available appointment.
To her surprise, she got one that same evening.
“I went in and there was an appointment for that night,” said Stern, a Tribeca resident. “So I just grabbed it.”
She spent 90 minutes waiting outside on a $10 folding chair she took to upper Manhattan. Once she arrived, the process was smooth, Stern said. During the 15-minute observation period, she made her second appointment.
She’s worried her neighbor’s 89-year-old mother won’t get a second shot, since their family is still waiting for an email to make an appointment at a NYC Health Department site in Lower Manhattan on Worth Street. Some have gotten emails in the days following their first appointment to automatically schedule their second dose appointment at the Worth Street site, according to an email notification a Manhattan resident shared with Gothamist.
NYC Health Department spokesperson Victoria Merlino says people are supposed to be told to make a second dose appointment while on site.
“We have staff available at all of the Department’s Vaccine Hubs to assist them in making the next appointment, and have been working with people to do so on their own devices,” Merlino said. “We have experienced occasional technical issues with the scheduling system and whenever that has occurred we work to resolve those immediately.”
Merlino added lines and wait times had “considerably reduced” by Wednesday.
“Many of the technical issues were fixed, we provided additional staff where they were needed and we improved signage to give clearer guidance to clients. We will continue to review how we can improve the experience for New Yorkers,” Merlino said.
Another Lower East Side woman, Michelle Kuppersmith, waited more than two hours on line at a Bronx high school to help her uncle get vaccinated last Sunday. He had an appointment at 5:50 p.m. and couldn’t get the shot until 8:15 p.m., she said.
A 28-year-old high-school art teacher from Queens, who requested anonymity because she fears the charter school she works for would retaliate against her, said that after spent two hours trying to get the city Health Department sign-up website to work, she stood in line for an hour at a vaccination site in Long Island City, and was finally told she could only make an appointment for her second dose 34 days later, rather than the recommended 28 days following the first Moderna shot.
The CDC says the second dose can be taken up to 42 days later, but if that’s not possible, people should take their second dose whenever possible and do not need to restart the vaccine series. Experts say the timing does not need to be exact. But the art teacher felt the lack of available time slots under the recommended timing was “irresponsible.”
“It feels so ridiculous,” she said. “Messing it up like this really doesn’t work in favor of the whole conversation of trying to persuade people to get it.”
This article has been updated with additional information from the NYC Health Department.
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COVID-19
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Sydney Pereira
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