New York Coronavirus Vaccine Distribution Begins - The New York Times

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A nurse in Queens received the coronavirus vaccine during a news conference with Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Sandra Lindsay, an intensive care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, received the coronavirus vaccine during a news conference with Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Pool photo by Mark Lennihan

The first coronavirus vaccination in the United States took place on Monday morning in Queens, state officials said, signaling a turning point in the battle against a pandemic that has profoundly scarred New York, killing more than 35,000 people and severely weakening the economy.

Sandra Lindsay, an intensive care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, received the shot, the first outside of a vaccine trial, shortly after 9 a.m. during news conference with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

The vaccine arrives at a time of urgency, with the state now confronting a worsening second wave after a relatively dormant period in the summer.

The state recorded an average of 10,048 cases per day last week, an increase of 72 percent from two weeks earlier. Patients are filling up hospital beds in numbers not seen since May.

Now, nearly 300 days after the state reported its first coronavirus case on March 1, health officials face another race against time to protect vulnerable New Yorkers from a now familiar foe. The distribution of a vaccine that has been fast-tracked in each stage of the process, from development to approval by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday night, figures to provide many logistical challenges.

“This vaccine is exciting because I believe this is the weapon that will end the war,” Mr. Cuomo said during the news conference. “We have planes, trains and automobiles moving this all over the state right now. We want to get it deployed, and we want to get it deployed quickly.”

The shipment on Monday is part of the state’s initial allocation to vaccinate people deemed most essential or at-risk, a group that includes frontline health care workers, as well as staff members and residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said in an interview on CNN on Monday morning that the first doses of the vaccine had arrived in New York City and that he would visit a hospital later in the day to watch a health care worker receive one of the first shots. Mr. de Blasio said the vaccine offered hope to the city, and New Yorkers could now see the light at the end of the tunnel.

“It’s going to be a good day,” the mayor said.

State officials are anticipating enough doses from the drugmaker Pfizer to begin inoculating 170,000 people. The process requires two doses for each person, administered a few weeks apart.

As soon as next week, the state is expecting 346,000 additional doses from the drugmaker Moderna, which is still waiting for F.D.A. approval for emergency use of its vaccine.

Those initial batches will begin to cover just over a quarter of the estimated 1.8 million people prioritized to receive the vaccine in the first phase of distribution in the state. Getting through those high-priority vaccinations will also take some time — state officials project to conclude the first phase sometime in January.

New York officials expect to receive the Pfizer vaccine in three waves this week from Kalamazoo, Mich., where the drugmaker has its largest manufacturing site. Most of the shipments are anticipated to land in Albany, New York’s capital, and New York City, and they will go to about 90 sites, mostly hospitals, that have the proper cold storage. Some doses will be trucked into the state.

The doses that arrived on Monday landed at Kennedy International Airport at 5:40 a.m. and were trucked to the hospital in Queens earlier than anticipated by Cuomo administration officials, who were tracking the 63-pound box of vials through a U.P.S. phone app.

The second phase of vaccinations will cover so-called essential workers, an expansive category of workers that has yet to be defined, but which may include police officers, firefighters, teachers, pharmacists, grocery store workers, public transit employees and others. This stage would also include individuals in the general population with comorbidities and underlying health conditions that especially put them at risk of contracting the virus.

Across the region, officials have begun preparation for the vaccine’s arrival.

In New Jersey, where nearly 18,000 deaths have been linked to the virus, the first doses of vaccine will be administered to nurses in Newark, the state’s hardest-hit city. Staff members from University Hospital, New Jersey’s only public hospital, will be first in line, beginning at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, state officials said.

Vaccinations will begin soon after at five additional hospitals with subzero freezers in Camden, Atlantic City, Hackensack, New Brunswick and Morristown, the officials said.

As of Friday evening, state officials were still scrambling to decipher the specifics of the vaccine’s much-anticipated arrival, as they waited for the federal government to grant the Pfizer vaccine, developed in conjunction with BioNTech, the necessary emergency use authorization. Approval came late that evening, setting off a chain of events that finally brought the vaccine to New York.

Even with so much uncertainty, Mr. Cuomo said the state had laid out the necessary groundwork — “the most aggressive distribution administration program,” he called it — to deliver the vaccines to hospitals and other sites. New York, like other states, also opted into a federal program that has partnered with the pharmacy companies CVS and Walgreens to administer the vaccines in nursing homes.

“The vaccine is coming and we’re ready to administer it,” Mr. Cuomo said on Friday.

The governor, a third-term Democrat, also announced on Friday that a state task force he convened, after concerns were raised that President Trump was expediting the vaccine rollout for political purposes, had given the Pfizer vaccine its blessing. Some of Mr. Cuomo’s conservative critics had panned the task force as a political maneuver meant to undermine Mr. Trump and that could delay the vaccine’s arrival in New York.

Mr. Cuomo, however, insisted on Friday that the state’s independent review would help build confidence among the public after surveys showing that many Americans did not trust the safety of a Covid-19 vaccine.

“We’re going to need a public education campaign to battle skepticism,” he said. “We have to hit 75 to 85 percent of the population for the vaccine to be effective. We have 50 percent of the population saying they won’t take the vaccine.”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

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