NEW YORK — Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that five pop-up COVID vaccination sites are opening in Western New York on Thursday.
Cuomo said in the ongoing effort to get more shots into the arms of New Yorkers, 35 pop-up clinics will soon be opening throughout the state with a goal of vaccinating more than 25,000 people this week.
Erie County is currently working to reschedule more than 9,000 canceled appointments since January 18, due to a shortage of vaccine. Erie County Commissioner of Health Dr. Gale Burstein said it could take until March to complete that task.
ight now, there are no appointments available for the five pop-up vaccination clinics in Western New York, which raised the question: Why are vaccines not yet available to everyone who is currently eligible?
State Senator Ed Rath III is a freshman Republican lawmaker from Williamsville and sits on the State Senate's Health Committee. He said, "Right now I don't think Albany is doing nearly enough, and what's been frustrating about it is we've only had one conversation with Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, and that was several weeks ago.
"There were many questions that were unanswered in that conversation, and quite honestly we've been frozen out of the dialogue."
Rath said since that conversation with Dr. Howard Zucker, he is not aware of any changes that have been implemented.
NYS Assemblymember Angelo Morinello used the word "abysmal" to describe the state's vaccine rollout. He said Governor Cuomo's administration needs to better communicate with state lawmakers and recommends consulting with distribution experts to get this right.
"They don't include us in anything," he said. "It changes by the day, we keep speaking, we keep talking about it, but we get nothing back."
Morinello and Rath pointed to an overarching issue that several state representatives from both parties have shared with us. They feel they are in the dark since giving Governor Cuomo executive powers for the pandemic.
As for Democratic lawmakers, State Senator Sean Ryan who also sits on the State Senate's Health Committee said this last week about vaccine distribution: "It's clunky, it's disjointed."
Ryan added, "If we want to keep people's confidence in government up, we have to deliver a better product."
When 2 On Your Side asked Governor Cuomo's administration about why vaccines are not available yet for everyone who is eligible, a spokesperson, Jack Sterne, sent this statement:
“The overarching problem here is a low allocation of doses from the federal government — the Biden Administration is working to increase production, and as soon as supply increases and other vaccines like Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca are approved, we will be able to accommodate more New Yorkers. The fact is in less than two months, we’ve created a vaccination system with literally thousands of distribution points that could administer well over 100,000 shots per day if we had the supply — but we simply don’t have enough doses.”