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Letters to the editor — Jan. 27, 2021
Thousands of NYC teachers have had COVID vaccine appointments canceled
So few staffers at one Queens nursing home have opted to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, that the facility on Tuesday warned its workers to get their shots now — or wait their turn like everyone else.
Across the Empire State, vaccines have been administered to only about 44 percent of all employees at long-term care facilities, according to state officials.
But at the Holliswood Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare, the vaccination rate among staff was at about 17 percent at the start of the week, officials said.
That was expected to go up Tuesday, with workers telling the Post they faced a deadline to sign up for inoculations.
“If we don’t get it today, they’re saying we have to wait until it’s open to the general public,” one worker said.
Three employees said that between 25 and 50 of their colleagues lined up Tuesday to get the shots.
But some workers said they had no intention of doing so themselves.
“No, I ‘ain’t taking it! Hell no! Why? I don’t trust the government!” one man said.
The 44 percent of long-term care workers now inoculated statewide is up slightly from the 37 percent that Cuomo reported on Jan. 18. Nursing home workers and residents were among the first in the state eligible to receive the vaccine.
“We are concerned. It’s an extraordinary concern,” Gareth Rhodes, a member of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 Response Task Force, told The Post.
By comparison, 72 percent of the state’s healthcare workers have been vaccinated, Cuomo said on Monday.
Cuomo has threatened to reallocate the unused nursing home vaccines so they can be given to the general public, but Rhodes declined to say when that might happen.
In July, state officials blamed infected workers for spreading the coronavirus among nursing home residents, whose official death toll from COVID-19 is now more than 8,000.
Holliswood has 21 confirmed resident deaths from COVID-19, and another 40 suspected — a total that’s about 20 percent of its 314-bed capacity, according to official state figures.
The nursing home is owned by Centers Health Care, which lists 51 facilities in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island on its website.
A spokesman, Jeff Jacomowitz, acknowledged that the vaccination rate for workers at its New York City nursing homes was just 16 percent.
But Jacomowitz said the company wasn’t trying to pressure its employees into getting inoculated.
“By New York state law, we cannot make someone get vaccinated,” he said.
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