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 to contracting the virus
Mayor Bill de Blasio has also spoken about prioritizing public housing residents — a group of more than 400,000 — as well as residents of 27 hard-hit neighborhoods.
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 partnered with CVS and Walgreens to administer the vaccines in nursing homes.
“The vaccine doesn’t work if it’s in the vial,” Mr. Cuomo said on Monday. “New York State has been working very hard to deploy it.”
