#Only 4,000 COVID vaccinations given in New York so far

Only 4,000 coronavirus vaccines have been administered in New York since Monday — out of more than 80,000 the state has received.

Between Monday and Tuesday, around 87,000 of the 170,000 Pfizer vaccines that the state is expecting were delivered to local hospitals, the state Department of Health said.

But fewer than 10 percent of those had actually been administered to healthcare workers as of Wednesday, according to Health Commissioner Howard Zucker.

That’s despite Cuomo’s fanfare-filled announcement about the vax rollout on Monday — when the first batch of 10,000 arrived in the Empire State.

“Today we’re in the process of administering 10,000 vaccines,” the governor had said.

A much larger allocation of 77,000 shots have arrived since Monday, when just 10 hospitals received vaccines, the DOH said.

Since then, around 90 hospitals statewide are estimated to have gotten deliveries of the shot, according to the department.

In New York City, only 73 shots were given on Monday — but that number jumped to 1,500 on Tuesday. It’s unclear how many were administered on Wednesday.

The DOH hopes the pace of the “staggered” rollout will pick up, anticipating that healthcare facilities will now vaccinate 100s of their staffers daily.

A DOH spokesman defended the early snails-pace rollout, saying that “This is the start of the process.”

“The governor said on Monday, ‘today we’re in the process of administering 10,000 vaccines,’ that very clearly indicates the start of an aggressive vaccination program,” said spokesman Gary Holmes.

“We’re following very rigorous protocols while ensuring we can get as many individuals vaccinated as safety, as quickly and as efficiently as possible.”

The state said that the remaining 83,000 doses that have yet to arrive will go to nursing homes, to be administered next week by the federal program with CVS and Walgreens.

Vivan Zayas, who heads the advocacy group Voices for Seniors — and whose father died of COVID-19 in a Long Island nursing home during the spring — said that the vaccine rollout is “slow for the nursing homes.”

“Nursing homes have the most vulnerable population. The nursing home staff should have been first in line,” Zayas said, along with hospital workers.

Another shipment of 346,000 vaccines from Moderna is expected to get to New York by Dec. 22.

One Wednesday, Cuomo said he anticipated that phase 2 of the vaccine rollout plan will begin in late January, for first responders and some essential workers to get the shot.

However, the governor said it could take more than half a year of vaccinating the public for it to begin having an effect.

“It’s a foot race over a six- to nine-month period,” he said. “We have to get the vaccination out as soon as we can. That will bring the COVID rate down.”

Additional reporting by Carl Campanile and Nolan Hicks