Monday, November 9, 2009

New York Clinics See Few Crowds for Free Vaccine/ NY Times

Excerpts from this NY Times article:

... While the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, said the clinics had the staff and enough vaccine to accommodate about 500 middle- and high-school students per clinic per hour — or as many as 31,500 vaccinations a day — a department spokeswoman put the total vaccinations administered on Saturday at 1,701.

So on Sunday, the clinics, operating out of public schools in all five boroughs, began offering the vaccine to pregnant women and increased the age limit for others to 24 from high school age. Still, the turnout was low: 1,749...

“We are also providing vaccines in the city’s elementary schools, and we’ve gotten about 23 percent of the consent forms returned. So we had those two numbers to work with. If we’d had 23 percent of the children in the city’s middle and high schools come, we’d have had very full clinics, indeed.”

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