WATCH: Gov. Cuomo threatens to fine NY hospitals $100,000 for slow vaccine distribution caused by his own guidelines

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Cuomo also said the state’s hospitals will be fined if they haven’t used their full allocations by the end of this week, or if they vaccinate people out of order from state priority guidelines. This puts providers in a bureaucratic conundrum, fail to use all of your COVID-19 vaccines within seven days will result in $100,000 fine. Vaccinate someone out of the state-designated order and receive a $1 million fine.

"I don’t want the vaccine in a fridge or a freezer, I want it in somebody’s arm," Cuomo said. "If you’re not performing this function, it does raise questions about the operating efficiency of the hospital."

January 4, 2021

Cuomo made the threat in an effort to speed up what has been an abysmally slow rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, and hours before announcing the state’s first case of a new, more contagious variant of the virus.

New York hospitals have been receiving supplies of vaccines over the past three weeks, but Cuomo said that as of Monday, hospitals had only administered 46 percent of their allocated vaccines. According to Cuomo, that amounts to roughly 300,000 out of 650,000 allocated doses.

Last week, New York received 259,000 more vaccine doses, with 139,400 from Pfizer and about 119,000 of Moderna, in addition to 636,200 doses the state had as of before Christmas.

Approximately 2.1 million New Yorkers are now eligible for vaccination under the state’s priority list, which was expanded this week to include all health care staff, including office staff who come into contact with the public.

While trying to deflect from attacks against himself for the slow rollout, Cuomo criticized by name out some of the slowest institutions at distributing the vaccine, citing several hospitals in the state that have administered fewer than 30 percent of their allocated doses. That’s compared to 99 percent of allocated vaccines administered at New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System and 62 percent at Northwell Health, the largest hospital system in New York.

Cuomo also called out New York City Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City hospitals, who only have a vaccination rate of 31 percent of the city's more than nine million residents and threatened to no longer allow slower hospitals to distribute the vaccine.

Barely over 110,000 people have been vaccinated in the city since it became available. De Blasio initially said 1 million people would be vaccinated in January when he first announced his million-vaccination goal last week.

During his own press conference on Monday, de Blasio offered a much more modest projection, saying the goal was 1 million doses, not 1 million people vaccinated.

In response to the governor's attacks, City Hall spokeswoman Avery Cohen told the New York Post, "threatening to 'revoke' the 'privilege' of vaccination from the City’s public hospital system is punitive and unnecessary."

The state's distribution plan mandated that many people received the vaccine before the elderly, including teachers, grocery store workers, transit employees, those who uphold "critical infrastructure."

January 4, 2021

Originally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended to every state that they should classify ethnic minorities as critical and vulnerable groups in their vaccine distribution plans before public pressure changed the policy to favor the elderly and those at risk.