NY Launches New Effort to Vaccinate College Students

New York state will begin shipping doses of the COVID-19 directly to public colleges and universities as part of an effort to vaccinate as many students and staff as possible before the end of the spring semester in May.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the initiative Monday, saying the state is trying to encourage the vaccine for younger people, who may be less concerned about receiving it.

“You can give it to someone else. You can bring it home and bring it to a parent, a grandparent, give it to an aunt,” Cuomo said. “You have a civic duty to make sure you are not a transmitter of COVID.”

Rather than include public colleges and universities in the overall pool of vaccine doses, Cuomo said the state will now do separate allocations for those facilities. That’ll start with 21,000 doses in the first round Cuomo said.

Some of the state’s public higher education institutions are already part of the state’s vaccine rollout. Both SUNY Albany and SUNY Oneonta have state-run mass vaccination sites on their campuses, for example.

And several of the state’s private colleges have already begun similar programs to vaccinate their students and staff through direct allocations from the state.

SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras had already announced a program, last week, to encourage students to receive the vaccine before they leave campus for the year. Doses of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine are being sent to those schools for distribution.

As of Monday, more than 750,000 vaccine doses had been administered at SUNY campuses, according to the university system.