The vaccination program in Paterson is up and running again. The city ran out of vaccine Monday morning, but got another 2000 doses on Wednesday and vaccinated another 359 people.
Dr. Paul Persaud is the director of Paterson’s Division of Health. He said the walk-in system the city is using is more efficient than appointments. “So far this has been working well,” he said. “I can scale up and scale down as needed in terms of administration of shots, I can do a lot more than actually 359 per day. If there’s a demand I can do about 1000 vaccinations per day ... I don’t want to keep vaccine on the shelf. Why should I keep vaccines on the shelf when there are people who need to be vaccinated?”
The site, at International High School, 200 Grand Street in Paterson, is open to anyone who lives, works or goes to school in New Jersey.
Persaud said the current supply should last another four or five days, but could go more quickly now that people as young as 65 are eligible. He said he has already ordered for next week and hopes supply can keep up with usage.
“Time will tell because we’ve been getting it every week,” he said. “We ran short on Monday. I don’t know, maybe they’ll realize that we’re using a lot of vaccine and they will allocate based on utilization, so hopefully we’ll get more next week.”