New York City will continue scheduling appointments for the monkeypox vaccine after the city health department announced nearly 26,000 additional doses were distributed the five boroughs.
Appointments will open up at 6 pm on July 22 and folks can sign up for shots either online at vax4nyc.nyc.gov or by phone at 877-829-4692. Previously, individuals were only able to reserve appointments online.
The appointments will be located at clinics and mass vaccination sites across the city. The city is currently offering the vaccine shots to men who have sex with men and transgender, gender non-conforming, and non-binary individuals who are at least 18 years of age and have had multiple or anonymous sex partners in the last two weeks.
Three clinics operated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will administer monkeypox vaccine shots at the locations in Chelsea and Central Harlem in Manhattan and Corona in Queens.
There will also be appointments available at Gotham Health, Vanderbilt in Staten Island and at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. Those two sites are operated by NYC Health + Hospitals.
The three mass vaccination sites will offer monkeypox vaccine shots on July 24, July 30, and July 30. Those sites are at Science Skills Center High School at 49 Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn; IS 125 at 46-02 47 Ave. in Queens; and Bronx High School of Science at 75 W. 205th St. in the Bronx.
There will be 17,000 shots allocated for public appointments, including 10,000 for mass vaccination sites and 6,400 for shots at clinics. Of the remaining shots, 3,850 will be distributed to community-based organizations serving at-risk populations and the rest will be for shots administered by providers and for contacts of known cases.
The federal government has been slow to roll out vaccines at a time when monkeypox cases are rising — and demand for jabs remains so high that all vaccine appointments in New York City are always reserved within a matter of minutes after they become available.
“The Health Department is moving quickly to distribute as many vaccine doses as we can in the most equitable way possible,” Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan said in a written statement. “With cases rising, it’s clear that there is a great need for more vaccine in New York City, and we are working with our federal partners to obtain more doses.”
As of July 21, the city identified 778 cases of monkeypox in New York City.
