Doctors Say “Huge Drops” in Hospitalizations and Deaths: “Vaccine is Working Just as We Said”

    New York City had a strong weekend for vaccinations, after more than 100,000 New Yorkers got their shots, Mayor Bill de Blasio happily announced this morning at his press conference.

   In fact, since the beginning of the city’s vaccination process in December 20202, 2,325,811 New Yorkers have been given immunized.

   Mayor de Blasio, who said he likes to give context to the accomplishments of “the largest vaccination effort in the history of New York City,” “[The number we have vaccinated] is more than the entire population of Houston, Texas: the fourth largest city in America, so this effort is growing and growing. 

    “A lot of times weekends are slow, but our strong weekend for vaccination is an indicator of the shape of things to come as we have more and more capacity,” the mayor said. 

   “We still need that supply of vaccine,” said the mayor. “[Supply] is the piece we really need from Washington, we still need more help from Albany. We still need more help from the manufacturers, but our capacity keeps growing. 

   “When we get the supply we need, it goes to a higher, higher, higher level: at least half a million vaccinations a week.”

      After this morning, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that limits his emergency panic powers, Mayor de Blasio is optimistic that more local control will be restored, so as to ease the vaccination process. 

“I appreciate the steps the legislature took to restore local control,” the mayor said this morning. “There is a reason for hundreds of years democracies have given local governments the ablility to control the lives of our own people, especially while Albany is going through so much turbulence.

    Also, this morning at the mayors press conference all of the mayor’s top doctors expressed optimism about the future.

   “We haven’t seen dramatic drops in case number,” said Health + Hospitals CEO Mitch Katz, MD, “but we have seen huge drops in serious hospitalizations and death.

    “The Vaccines are working exactly as we said. They are effective in preventing serious disease and death. Now, with the variants, we just maintain the [protocols that protect ourselves] from the variants that may make the virus more transmissible.”

 Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.