NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) -- New York state will receive 110,000 more monkeypox vaccine doses from the federal government, with most going to New York City.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the allocation on Thursday, saying 80,000 vaccine doses are headed to the city, which is a major U.S. hotspot for the virus.
Another 30,000 doses of the vaccine will be sent to the rest of the state.
Schumer called the distribution a “big win for public health” in New York and said more doses “are on the way.”
“The federal government has more work to do to fully contain the monkeypox threat, but today marks a critical step in that fight and delivers a huge sigh of relief to New Yorkers waiting for their monkeypox vaccine,” Schumer said in a statement to Politico.
U.S. health regulators said Wednesday that nearly 800,000 doses of the monkeypox vaccine were being distributed amid criticism that authorities have been too slow in deploying the vaccine, potentially missing the window to contain what could soon become an entrenched infectious disease.
The U.S. already has sent more than 310,000 doses of the two-shot Jynneos vaccine to state and local health departments, but clinics in New York and other cities have said they still don’t have enough shots to meet demand.
There were more than 4,600 reported monkeypox cases in the U.S. as of late Wednesday, with more than 1,100 of those cases in New York City, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Biden administration could declare monkeypox a health emergency by the end of the week, according to Politico. Last week, the World Health Organization declared monkeypox a “global health emergency.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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