New York will be reallocating unused COVID-19 vaccines after more than ten thousand nursing home residents and nearly half of staffers declined the jab, according to Gareth Rhodes, a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 Response Task Force.
Rhodes said that out of 70,000 nursing home residents, 57,000 have been vaccinated, while 13,000 have declined. Meanwhile, out of 89,000 nursing home staff, 41,000 have declined.
Overall, 105,000 first-doses of the vaccine have been used so far in nursing homes, while 120,000 doses remain.
“We’re gonna reallocate those that are used in the long-term facility program to the state program, but we’ll make sure that the residents who want to take it and the staff who want to take it, we will reserve their doses,” said Cuomo, who in July came under fire for ordering nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients from hospitals.
The reallocation comes more than a week after New York came under scrutiny over discarded vaccines – with officials changing regulations which required that extra doses to be tossed.- READ MORE
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