New York City Begins Offering COVID Vaccine To Students, Parents & Staff At Summer Rising Sites

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — New York City is starting a new effort to get students, parents and staff vaccinated ahead of the upcoming school year.

Vaccinations will be offered at summer programs held at public schools, including one clinic that opens Monday at Fort Hamilton High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The mayor’s office said the sites were carefully selected based on their locations and students’ age eligibility. They will be open through August 13.

“We’re going to go really intensely into a focus on our young people, and you’ll see more and more in the lead up to school starting in September,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday.

The mayor’s office said 44% of 12 to 17-year-olds who live in the city have already received their first dose.

“That’s for a group of people that have only been eligible for about 9 or ten weeks,” de Blasio said.

Starting Monday, COVID vaccines will be made available at certain Summer Rising sites. Eventually, they will be dispersed at 25 locations in all five boroughs.

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“Certainly anyone who goes out and gets vaccinated right now is going to have a vaccine that protects them through the fall and the winter,” said former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

With a bigger surge in cases expected as students return to school in the fall, Dr. Gottlieb said Pfizer plans to test a lower dose of vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.

“The FDA recently indicated that it’s unlikely to be available before mid-winter, because I believe that the FDA is likely to require four to six months of follow-up of the children involved in the clinical trial.”

This comes as the vaccination rate is slowing down and there’s a so-called “summer surge” in cases. In New York State, new cases have more than doubled in the last week — from 823 people testing positive on July 18 to 1,982 just six days later.

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The seven-day average of new cases nationwide has increased nearly 50%, fueled in part by the highly infectious Delta variant.

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said. “It’s really an outbreak among the unvaccinated.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says about 49% of Americans are vaccinated, but the organization is actively considering recommending even those who are wear masks in public, since they can still get a less severe case of COVID and possibly pass it on.

Back in New York City, the schools chancellor encourages all families to get their eligible kids their first dose by August 9, so they are fully vaccinated by the start of the school year.

from CBS New York https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/07/26/nyc-summer-rising-covid-vaccines/
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