City Falls Short On 1M Coronavirus Vaccination Goal

NEW YORK CITY — Supply woes robbed New York City of its chance to hit 1 million coronavirus vaccinations in January, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

But de Blasio on Monday still performed a modest victory lap for what the city’s rocky vaccination effort has accomplished: 815,193 doses going into New Yorkers’ arms.

That’s more than the total population of Seattle, Washington, he said.

“But the bottom line is we don't have the supply we need,” he said. “This situation gets less and less acceptable by the day. We have the capacity to vaccinate half a million New Yorkers a week and we're nowhere near that right now, because we don't have supply.”

De Blasio repeatedly claimed the city now has capacity to hit 500,000 vaccination a week, but so far hasn’t had a chance to prove it.

The city expects receive somewhere north of 100,000 doses of vaccine a week until federal efforts to amp up supply take hold.

In comments Monday, de Blasio called on the federal government to direct pharmaceutical companies to produce Pfizer- and Moderna-developed COVID-19 vaccines — an effort he compared to manufacturing efforts in World War II.