New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told his constituents on Monday that he aims to increase vaccination numbers by convincing people to get the vaccine, even if it means having to drive them to a vaccination site.
“We need to get in those communities, and we have to knock on those doors, and we have to convince people, and put them in a car, and drive them and get that vaccine in their arm,” said the Democrat governor. “That is the mission.”
Cuomo stated during a press conference at the Yankee Stadium that the “good news” is that 75 percent of adults in New York have been vaccinated. The bad news, he said, is that 25 percent of New Yorkers still aren’t vaccinated.
“COVID-19 exposed longstanding inequities in our society, and we’ve seen evidence of that in both the positivity rate and the vaccination rate in communities that were hardest hit by the virus,” Cuomo said in a statement. He also announced that $15 million from the state’s budget will be allocated toward promoting vaccination in communities disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“New York is pulling out all the stops to get shots in arms, and this budget funding will help us target outreach efforts in the state’s most vulnerable communities to make sure that everyone is able to get vaccinated,” Cuomo said. “We’ve made incredible progress in the fight against COVID-19, but there’s more work to do, and this will help us protect communities across the state.”
Not too long ago, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, made a similar statement about persuading non-vaccinated Americans to get the shot. During a July 6 press conference, Psaki said that the Biden Administration plans to focus on “community-by-community, door-to-door outreach” in order to get Americans vaccinated.
This plan came on the heels of the Biden White House falling short of their Fourth of July vaccination goal of 70 percent of Americans.
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics as of July 27, more than 163 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, that’s 49.2 percent of the nation’s population.
In New York alone, 56.6 percent of all citizens have been fully vaccinated.
Cuomo has come under fire for his COVID-19 protocols in state-run nursing homes and long-term care facilities. He has been accused by members of both political parties of downplaying the COVID-19 death toll numbers of elderly patients in nursing homes. It was made public last week that the U.S. Dept. of Justice will not conduct an investigation into Cuomo’s nursing home scandal.
