Thousands of New York City teachers have canceled their COVID-19 vaccine appointments thanks to the supply and scheduling of snafus, a bureaucratic mess that could only delay the reopening of schools, he said Tuesday in the union leader Michael Mulgrew.
The situation has made it virtually impossible to keep track of who gets the shot, Mulgrew said.
“I want the schools to open in September. But there are a lot of things that have to happen before we can make that call, ”the big union said.
David Bloomfield, a professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center, agreed and warned, “Until we have widespread vaccines, it will be difficult to make them effective.”
As for the city’s education department and Blasio’s administration, they were both unable to say on Tuesday how many Big Apple educators have received the sting.
There are about 75,000 teachers assigned to classrooms in the city’s public schools. Current face-to-face teachers were given priority to get the shots after the city reopened some preschool to fifth grade schools to learn in the classroom earlier this month.
Mulgrew told The Post that about 20,000 city teachers in the classroom have requested appointments through the union and that 10,000 have so far matched suppliers.
Of these, about 5,000 have been vaccinated.
But teachers also seek inoculation independently, either through city services or channels outside the five districts.
Mulgrew said appointments across the city have been massively canceled due to a shortage of vaccines and scheduling problems.
“We’ve had a couple of thousands of people contact us and they said their appointment was canceled,” he said.
Several teachers confirmed to The Post this week that the city’s vaccination dates had been null and void and could not get new ones.
Mulgrew said Tuesday that the City Council had promised to relay how many teachers had been vaccinated through agencies outside the union, but had not yet provided the data.
A tricky issue, a union source said, is the fact that some teachers living outside the city could be vaccinated without direct notification from local agencies.
“The city really needs to better coordinate the program,” Mulgrew said. “We’re in a place where we’ll be out of this in six or nine months because we developed the herd’s immunity or we’ll be in that period one or two more years.”
Mulgrew said the union has tried to ensure that doses are available before matching members with suppliers.
This approach has allowed the organization to avoid cancellations, he said.
“The federal government needs to provide us with more vaccines,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. But you shouldn’t make all these appointments and then cancel them because you’re making excessive reservations. “
City officials learned Tuesday they were facing unpredictable firing supplies.
“There is a national vaccine deficit,” City Council representative Avery Cohen said.
“Like many other cities in America, we have been forced to reschedule thousands of appointments due to supply problems. With more than 650,000 doses administered so far, we have built the infrastructure to shoot millions of New Yorkers in the arms. We just need the doses. to do it “.
Mulgrew stressed that there is no vaccination rate for magic teachers that triggers the reopening of the country’s largest school system.
He said citywide COVID-19 indicators and vaccination rates will determine when classrooms greet children full-time once again.