NYPD Coronavirus Vaccinations Halt Amid Cuomo-De Blasio Dispute

NEW YORK CITY — A state edict shot down Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to start giving certain NYPD and correctional personnel the coronavirus vaccine.

De Blasio on Thursday said the city halted the planned vaccinations but again appealed to Gov. Andrew Cuomo — who flatly said police don’t yet qualify for the shots — to expand eligibility to vulnerable New Yorkers and essential workers.

He also defended the city’s plan to vaccinate NYPD personnel, displaying a slide comparing the first responder criteria in the state’s category 1a — the only group of New Yorkers with permission to get doses — and the city’s cops and correctional officers.

Perform CPR? Treat people in shock? Prove initial care in medical emergencies? Cops clearly fit all those criteria, de Blasio said.

“What is gray here?” he said.

The city planned to move forward with 25,000 vaccinations for certain NYPD personnel based on that interpretation. But Cuomo and state health officials kiboshed the effort.

Cuomo later Thursday responded to de Blasio without naming him. He dismissed the argument that cops count qualify for the 1a category because they perform some health care tasks such as administer CPR.

“That doesn’t make every police officer a health care worker,” he said. “That’s just silly.”

Law enforcement officers remain part of the state’s 1b category — the next group of New Yorkers slated to be vaccinated that includes people 75 and up and essential workers.

Cuomo said at roughly 900,000 available doses that the state doesn’t have enough shots to cover the 2.1 million health care workers in 1a.

He repeated criticism at hospitals, particularly the city-run Health + Hospitals system, that he claimed were administering shots too slowly.

Certain H+H locations have only given out about 30 percent of their doses, while other hospitals have reached 100 percent, he said. He didn’t say how many and which type of 1a recipients were at each facility, making it difficult to gauge how efficiently those doses were going out.

The state will announce “reallocation” of doses from certain hospitals on Friday, Cuomo said.

The Cuomo-de Blasio dispute over vaccinations, who qualifies and when also played out between their staffs on Twitter.

Bill Neidhardt, a spokesperson for the mayor, issued a point-by-point refutation of a state release on opening up vaccinations to wider groups.

The Governor's office released a long statement as to why they won't give cities and counties the freedom to vaccinate first responders and the elderly.

A line-by-line response in bold below. But it all boils down to this: There is no excuse to slow down the vaccination effort. pic.twitter.com/ysPwEh2Njh
— Bill Neidhardt (@BNeidhardt) January 7, 2021

The tweet drew pointed responses from Rich Azzopardi, a governor’s spokesperson. He implied that the city lacked the competence to distribute vaccines.

Spare me the deflection, there are 917k front line workers in NYC. They need to be vaccinated as, as others have done competently in other parts of the state. https://t.co/O4tYgoViv8
— Rich Azzopardi (@RichAzzopardi) January 7, 2021