New York, Florida tell hospitals to speed COVID-19 vaccinations or lose supply

NEW YORK: The governors of New York and Florida sought to accelerate the slower-than-expected rollout of coronavirus vaccines by warning hospitals on Monday (Jan 4) that they would reduce future allocations to those that fail to dispense shots quickly enough.

In New York, hospitals must administer vaccines within a week of receiving them or face a fine and loss of future supplies, Governor Andrew Cuomo said, hours before announcing the state's first known instance of a new, more infectious coronavirus variant that was first detected in Britain.

"I don't want the vaccine in a fridge or a freezer, I want it in somebody's arm," the governor said. "If you're not performing this function, it does raise questions about the operating efficiency of the hospital."

Among the slowest performers was the New York City Health + Hospitals system, the city's main public hospital network, which had dispensed only 31 per cent of its allocated doses according to Cuomo, compared to 99 per cent for a few private hospitals in the state. The average statewide was 46 per cent.

A spokeswoman for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio criticized the governor's policy.

"Threatening to 'revoke' the 'privilege' of vaccination from H+H is punitive & unnecessary," Avery Cohen, the spokeswoman, wrote on Twitter.

Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said New York and Florida were being "overly bureaucratic" in penalising hospitals that, besides carrying out vaccinations, were busy treating growing numbers of COVID-19 patients.

"Instead of fining hospitals, why not give them more resources to do this, more money, more staffing," he said in a telephone interview, "rather than penalising them and not realising that they, not people in Albany or Tallahassee, they're the ones that are actually taking care of patients?"

Cuomo's later announcement that the new, more contagious variant known as B.1.1.7 had been found in New York gave new urgency to the state's efforts to accelerate vaccinations.

The variant, which has also been recorded in Florida, Colorado and California, was detected in a man in his 60s living in a town north of Albany who had not recently travelled, suggesting community spread is taking place.

'GOT TO DO BETTER'

The US federal government has distributed more than 15 million vaccine doses to states and territories around the country, but only around 4.5 million have been administered so far, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Monday.

The US government has fallen far short of its target of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020. Officials said they expect the rollout will pick up significantly this month.

READ: Major US airlines back 'global' COVID-19 testing requirements: Letter

Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CBS News that there are 15 million to 20 million doses of vaccine available.

"We should be hopeful about that while acknowledging we have got to do better and we are going to keep doing better," Adams said. "And I promise you, you will see in these next two weeks numbers increase substantially."

The United States had reported a total of 20.5 million COVID-19 cases and 351,480 deaths as of midnight on Sunday. On a seven-day rolling average, it is reporting 2,636 coronavirus deaths per day.

In Florida, where officials have put senior citizens ahead of many essential workers for getting the vaccine, Governor Ron DeSantis announced a policy under which the state would allocate doses to hospitals that dispense them most quickly,

"Hospitals that do not do a good job of getting the vaccine out will have their allocations transferred to hospitals that are doing a good job at getting the vaccine out," DeSantis said at a briefing.

"We do not want vaccine to just be idle at some hospital system," he added, though he did not say they would face fines.

Florida will also deploy an additional 1,000 nurses to administer vaccines and will keep state-run vaccination sites open seven days a week, he said.

"BODY ARMOUR"

New York has dispensed about 175,000 doses of the 896,000 it has received since mid-December, according to CDC data. Florida has dispensed 265,000 of the 1.14 million doses it received.

In New York City, the mayor said obstacles were slowing his goal to have 1 million residents receive a first of two vaccine doses by the end of January. A little over 110,000 residents have received their first dose so far, according to city data.

De Blasio urged the state to broaden early eligible groups beyond healthcare workers and nursing home residents.

Monday also marked the first day when some Americans were due to receive their second vaccine shot, three weeks after getting the first dose. Among them was Maritza Beniquez, a healthcare worker in Newark, New Jersey.

"I now have body armour," she said after receiving the dose in a video shared on Facebook by state officials. 

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