(2020-12-18) How New York City Vaccinated 6 Million People In Less Than A Month

How New York City Vaccinated 6 Million People in Less Than a Month. On April 4 (1947), the results came back from the U.S. Army Medical School Laboratory in Washington. All three were confirmed cases of smallpox, which had not been seen in New York City since before the war. (compare to COVID-19)

The city’s health commissioner, Israel Weinstein, had taken the job 10 months earlier. He’d been a child on the Lower East Side when a smallpox outbreak brought the city to its knees in the early 1900s.

Thanks to a vaccine developed in the late 1700s and refined in the decades that followed, smallpox outbreaks had generally been contained.

In 1947, most New Yorkers had been inoculated against smallpox. They’d been told the inoculation would protect them for life — but there was no guarantee. In some cases, the vaccine didn’t take. In others, the immunity wore off. Mr. Le Bar was proof of that.

The lab results reached him on Good Friday, April 4. In two days, New Yorkers would be gathering for the city’s annual Easter Parade

At 2 o’clock that day, he held a news conference, urging all city dwellers to get vaccinated immediately, even if they had been inoculated as children.

In a series of daily radio addresses, Dr. Weinstein focused on transparency and a consistent message. The vaccine, he said, was free, and there was, in his words, “absolutely no excuse for anyone to remain unprotected.”

But the municipal stockpile contained nowhere near enough to vaccinate all of the city’s 7.8 million residents.

With the full cooperation of Mayor William O’Dwyer, Dr. Weinstein secured 250,000 units of vaccine from the naval medical supply depot in Brooklyn. He had 780,000 doses flown in from military bases in California and Missouri. He purchased an additional two million from private manufacturers, and then he ordered more.

He directed his Bureau of Laboratories to convert its bulk supplies into single-dose units, and he began a tracing program to locate and vaccinate those who had been in contact with the victims.

At first, the public’s response was lackluster. Easter Sunday turned out to be surprisingly warm and sunny — the temperature hit a record 79 degrees — and more than a million New Yorkers turned out for the parade. That weekend, only 527 people requested vaccines. But days later when news broke that Ismael Acosta’s wife, Carmen, had died from smallpox, and that three more cases had been discovered, people’s minds changed — and, as it happened, so did the weather.

the city enlisted thousands of civilian volunteers to help deliver inoculations. Armed with vials of vaccine, the volunteers, along with professional health care providers, administered as many as eight doses per minute. Making their way through every school in the city, they inoculated 889,000 students. In the first two weeks, five million New Yorkers were vaccinated against smallpox.