Another COVID-19 vaccination center opens in Nassau County

Nassau County on Saturday opened a new COVID-19 vaccine distribution site in New Cassel, as the state prepares to add 3.2 million more New Yorkers on Monday to those eligible to receive the shot.

The Town of North Hempstead’s Yes We Can Community Center is the second county-run vaccination center — one at Nassau Community College opened on Tuesday — and it was selected largely because the area surrounding it has many Black and Latino residents, said County Executive Laura Curran.

"This is just the beginning of our effort to ramp up vaccinations, especially by making sure all communities have equitable access, especially those that have been hardest hit by this epidemic: Black and brown communities," Curran said as she stood outside the community center on a cold, windy Saturday afternoon.

U.S. Blacks and Latinos are about four times more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 than whites and 2.8 times more likely to die from the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nassau County Legislator Siela Bynoe (D-Westbury) thanked the Curran administration for working "to ensure that this POD [point of distribution] is set here, in the backyards of essential workers, front line workers who have borne the brunt of this pandemic. It’s not lost on me that we’re here — we’re here in a community that has been devastated, ravaged by this disease."

County Health Commissioner Dr. Lawrence Eisenstein said the community center and college were, combined, capable of vaccinating 1,000 people a day, with sufficient vaccine supply.

Curran said the county would add more sites as vaccinations expand. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday announced that people 75 and older and some essential workers — including police and firefighters not vaccinated earlier, teachers and public-transit workers — could get vaccinated as early as Monday, although health care workers would still have priority.

In addition to the two county sites, and a site run by Suffolk County, there are currently more than 100 other vaccination locations on Long Island, most of them federal qualified health centers, hospitals and urgent-care centers. Cuomo on Friday promised "thousands of providers coming online next week."

Bishop Lionel Harvey, pastor of First Baptist Cathedral of Westbury, which is a short walk from the community center, said he had "stood over countless numbers of caskets" of people who died of COVID-19.

Polls show Black Americans are less likely to take the vaccine than other racial and ethnic groups, a sign of the distrust among Blacks of the health care system because of continuing bias and past medical experiments on Black subjects without their knowledge.

Asked what he would tell Black Nassau residents skeptical of a vaccine, Harvey, who is Black, said that, although the history of bias in the health care system was clear, "COVID kills and it has killed a disproportionate number of people in our communities, and we need to take some proactive action. … I would encourage all Black and brown people to take this vaccine, because we’re going to stop this wicked disease."

Harvey, deputy director of the Nassau County Office of Minority Affairs, said he planned on taking it "as soon as I possibly can" after he qualified for it.

Alex Miller, 29, a speech language pathologist from Port Washington, got the vaccine at the Yes We Can center Saturday. She said after she learned Thursday that she had become eligible for the vaccine as an outpatient medical professional, she began trying repeatedly to get an appointment on a state vaccination website.

"It was like one spot would open up, and it would immediately be taken, like that, and then last night I checked and there were times that had opened up and I signed up," she said. "It was a relief, for sure."

Curran said vaccination sites "are reliant on the supply of vaccine from the federal government and New York State. We will get the vaccine out as quickly as we get the vaccine in."

Miller waited in a socially distant line in the community center gym to be called to one of 12 tables where county employees and members of the county’s Medical Reserve Corps were administering the vaccine that was developed by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health.

Miller said afterward that the shot didn’t hurt.

"It’s exciting, and it feels like a responsibility, and I think that everybody should definitely do it," she said.

In New York City, three new vaccination centers will open on Sunday, in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, with 12 more scheduled to open later in the week, the city health department said Saturday. Each center will have the capacity to serve about 5,000 to 7,000 people a day, the city said. Slots are available by appointment only.

A "vaccination hub" in Manhattan that will administer vaccines 24/7 will open on Tuesday.

That adds to the 125 existing vaccination sites in the city, some city-run and some not.

Sign up for COVID-19 text alerts at newsday.com/text.

By David Olson

david.olson@newsday.com,matthew.chayes@newsday.com@DavidOlson11,

David Olson covers health care. He has worked at Newsday since 2015 and previously covered immigration, multicultural issues and religion at The Press-Enterprise in Southern California.