EDITOR's NOTE:
We have said that Mayor Bill de Blasio's Media Availability questions from reporters was a fraud, and today Hazel Sanchez from WCBS-TV proved our point.
On the 6 PM WCBS-TV News reporter Hazel Sanchez reported on a story about the group of bicyclist that attacked a car with a man and his mother inside who feared for their lives. She also reported that she asked Mayor de Blasio about the incident reporting what the mayor had said almost word for word. Ms. Sanchez was the first to be called on by the moderator of the Mayor's Media Availability, and here is her question and the mayor's answer, as printed in the transcript of the Mayor's Media Availability.
Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. The first question today goes to Hazel Sanchez from WCBS.
Question: Good morning, Mr. Mayor, Happy New Year to you.
Mayor: Happy New Year, Hazel, how you feel?
Question: I'm good. I'm good. You've probably seen that video of a group of bicyclists attacking a man in his mother inside his SUV. I spoke with a driver, Max Torgovnick, he's a lifelong New York City resident and he says he feels, he deserves answers from the city as to what allowed this to happen? And what is the city going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again?
Mayor: Hazel is absolutely unacceptable. And, you know, you have these teenagers doing something that's just wrong, period. At least one has been arrested. The others will be. Look, we got to teach our young people better all the time. It's incumbent upon all of us, but we also have to have consequences. So, there will be consequences in this case. I don't want to ever see anything like this happen in New York City.
Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning New York City. This day is finally here, in less than 14 hours, it will be 2021. I could not be happier. I bet a lot of you feel the same way. We are so ready to kick 2020 out the door. And I just am feeling totally energized that the new year is going to be here and great things are going to happen. Tonight is going to be very special. Don't believe any doubting Thomases that say because there's not going to be a million people or more in Times Square that it's not going to be special. It's going to be actually arguably the most special, the most poignant, the most moving New Year's Eve. Everyone, watch it on television, don't go down there. Watch from home. But it's going to be powerful and think about it. We're going to be honoring our health care heroes and first responders and folks who did amazing work this year. Folks from the Cure Violence movement who did great work this year. All out there, small group observing the festivities and enjoying the festivities. But they'll be the people we truly have in our hearts because they're the folks who saw us through this year.
But think about the performers too. Amazing cast of performers, New York City's own, the Bronx’s own Jennifer Lopez. That's for the Bronx. This is a great moment to have her highlighted as we bring in the new year. And my personal favorite, Gloria Gaynor will be singing, I will survive. I can't think of a more amazing, special and appropriate song for this occasion. I'm going to tell you, it's going to be very powerful, very special. Everyone, tune in. I guarantee you that Chirlane and I will push the button on time. In fact, we will be tempted to push the button early and start the new year early, but we will get there for sure. 2021, right around the corner. And we're going to do great things in 2021.
And I’m going to talk about that today. I want to start with the most important New Year's resolution I could possibly offer you in the month of January 2021, we will vaccinate a million New Yorkers. A million people we will reach in January. This city can do it. The amazing health care professionals of this city are ready. We are going to set up new sites all over the city on top of the many, many sites that are already operational, we're going to expand from our hospitals and our clinics to community clinics, to locations we'll set up all over the neighborhoods of the city. Our goal is to get to upwards of 250 locations citywide. This is going to be a massive effort. This is going to be part of the largest single vaccination effort in the history of New York City. It's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take tremendous urgency and focus. And we will need help from the federal government. We will need help from the State government. We will need help from the vaccine manufacturers, but we're making clear to the whole world, we can achieve a million vaccinations in January. We get that help, we'll make it happen. We have the ability to make it happen on the ground. And we are anxious to get it done. Look, President-elect Biden said it right. This whole country is behind the pace it needs to be. We're going to need to go faster to beat back the coronavirus, to restart our economy, to protect people's lives, to recover. We've got to go faster. New York City will lead the way. We have the will. We have the sense of urgency. We have the capacity. We have the know-how. This is a chance for New York City to shine. And help achieve the President-elect’s goal.
It is so clear that there's no reason, there's no reason for anything but urgency at this point. And that every single person we reach takes us one step closer to recovery. Now we are doing better than most of the country. That's the good news. But we're nowhere near where we need to be. 88,000 New Yorkers have been vaccinated so far. That's great. 88,000 people is nothing to sneeze at. But we need to go into overdrive now. We need every day to speed up and reach more and more people. And we're committed to doing that. So, we know that we have the ability. We're going to do this with a really decentralized grassroots effort. We're going to go all over the city. We are going to create new hubs of activity. So, number one, new COVID vaccine hubs will be created all around the city on top of the locations we have, Two, Test and Trace sites will start to be locations for vaccination as well. Test and Trace has been very successful reaching to every corner of the city, protecting people. We're going to take that same capacity, use it to help us achieve more vaccinations. And three, we're going to scale up the capacity of local organizations that can do this work. We have so many tremendous partners on the ground. So many community-based organizations that could be part of this. And have the ability to reach people, move people, motivate people. They are going to be a part of this in a big way.
So, all of this will be coordinated by our vaccine command center, lot of moving parts. But we can get it done again. Again, we need the federal government to be there with us, to be committed to this goal, to help us achieve it, to give us flexibility. We need the State government to work with us to keep this moving. We need the manufacturers to keep providing the doses. But that can be done. All those things can be done and we're going to make together, something very special happen here. What we will not allow to happen in New York City is for people to jump the line, use their wealth or their privilege to get vaccines that they should not be getting. We're already seeing this, unfortunately, around the country. Congressional staffers, jumping the line, even if they're not in a category that should be a priority. We're seeing pharmaceutical company executives jumping the line. We want the people who need the vaccine most to get it first. And we're going to stick to those priorities. And we're going to be aggressive about it. So, right now, of course, the focus on health care workers, the folks who have kept us safe, our heroes, who we need the most to keep safe, going forward. Focus on nursing home staff and residents. We're going to keep building out from there faster and faster. But we're going to make sure the distribution is based on equity and fairness. And as we get out into communities, that we focused on the communities hardest hit that unfortunately bore the brunt. They had the most cases, they had the most deaths and have the most need. So, we can do it in New York City, all of us together. And the person who's going to help us to lead the way with the incredible effort of his team, the Health Department, and they have a lot of great history, a lot of great success historically in vaccinations. Very, very proud to introduce on this auspicious day, our Health Commissioner, Dr. Dave Chokshi.
Commissioner Dave Chokshi, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene: Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. Well beating a virus is a team sport and we need every position on the field to come together. I saw this in such a poignant way yesterday when I visited a nursing home in my neighborhood in Queens. Residents and staff alike were getting vaccinated. I heard one resident say she couldn't wait to get her shot, but she asked her regular nurse to stay by her side while she was getting it for moral support. These are the small and large ways our health care heroes have quite literally moved the needle for the past couple of weeks. Resulting in over 88,000 vaccinations to date. But we will need to further accelerate our efforts to turn vaccines into vaccinations. One key to doing this as the Mayor mentioned is expanding points of access across our entire city. Our goal is to double the access points for vaccination within a month from hospitals to community health centers, to urgent care clinics, totaling at least 250 sites across the five boroughs.
Part of our strategy includes launching the first dedicated City vaccine hubs in the coming weeks. These are City operated vaccination clinics stood up rapidly as points of distribution in school gymnasiums and other sites. The first sites will launch in mid-January administering 45,000 doses per week with plans to expand over time if we get adequate supply of vaccine. We are picking the locations of these sites to help ensure access in our priority neighborhoods for the places and the people who have been hardest hit by this vicious virus, most often communities of color. In addition, the City has built an unprecedented testing apparatus through the Test and Trace Corps that can also be leveraged to administer vaccines at certain sites. Again, with a focus on hardest hit communities.
Finally, the most essential partners have always been community organizations. Activating them by providing nurses and pharmacists to vaccinate onsite, in communities will provide capacity for several tens of thousands of vaccinations per week by the end of January. This is the kind of thing we do every year during flu season, supporting events at churches and community centers. But this would be like our flu campaign in overdrive. Growing capacity through these initiatives, along with our existing hospital, clinic, and pharmacy infrastructure gets us to the ability to administer a total of one million doses by the end of January. I do want to specify that these are aggressive goals. And this historic vaccination campaign is a team sport as I mentioned. We'll need blocking and tackling to run at the pace that we want from a number of partners, but particularly our colleagues in State and federal government. Swiftly extending guidance on the populations eligible for vaccination is particularly important. From hospital workers and nursing homes to other health care workers, first responders and of course our seniors. And we need a sufficient supply of vaccine with a clear roadmap of what New York City can expect to receive from the federal government, not just for next week, but for the months ahead. But if these elements of the game plan come together, we can move fast and travel far.
Finally, we need New Yorkers themselves to choose to get vaccinated, but we'll help you by making sure your vaccine questions get answered, endeavoring to dispel misinformation, and doubling our access points to make it more convenient for you. Mr. Mayor, it's a particular honor for me to be able to join you on this last day of 2020. I wanted to conclude with some brief tailored messages. To my fellow health care workers, thank you so much for all you have done during this really tough year, but if you've gotten your vaccine, I have one more task for you, be sure to tell the story of why you got vaccinated and reach out to people who may still have unanswered questions. Our website nyc.gov/covidvaccine has the resources you need. To hospital leaders, COVID-19 is not taking the weekend off, so I strongly urge you to schedule vaccination clinics over the weekend, too. And to all New Yorkers, I remain quite concerned by the increase in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths across our beloved city. It's not too late to cancel your New Year's Eve gathering plans and stay safe by staying home. And finally, to the year 2020, good riddance. I'm looking forward to a better year ahead.
Mayor: Well said, Dave. Listen, I want to say to our Commissioner Dave Chokshi, thank you for your extraordinary work this year, for your team's amazing work, some of the other colleagues here as part of this press conference today, Deputy Mayor Melanie Hartzog, and Senior Advisor Jay Varma, and CEO of Health and Hospitals Mitch Katz, you've all been heroes this year. You really have been. You're all very modest people, so maybe I'm making you blush, but the fact is all of you have been heroes of 2020. All of you are going to be part of the history of this city, and you're going to be in the history books as people who made a tremendous positive difference for the people in New York City and your whole teams. Thank you, and I'm thanking you – I'm thanking you as individuals, but I'm also thanking you for the amazing teams you've assembled and the amazing work you've all done.
And listen, talking about team, I'm going to pick up right word Dave started, talking about team. This is going to be a team effort to reach one million vaccinations in January. We're going to work with the whole community. We’re going to work with the whole health care world. We're also going to call all city agencies to be part of this. So, as Dave mentioned, you know, you talk about a school gymnasium, Department of Education is going to be a part of this. Think about public housing, NYCHA, our community centers. We're going to be out there in NYCHA developments over the months ahead there are going to be a crucial piece of this as well. We are going to focus intensely on the communities that need help the most, communities that bore the brunt, and our public housing residents certainly bore the brunt of this crisis. So, in January and beyond, you're going to see this grow, be more and more grassroots, more and more people getting involved, leaders, agencies, institutions, parts of the community, you name it. This is going to be an extraordinary effort. I wanted to do a special thank you to the State of New York. We've been working really closely with our State partners over these last weeks, determining how to do something that's never been done before. This is a brand-new vaccine, brand new type of vaccine. We've had to be really smart and careful about getting it implemented. We're working well with the state to figure out the steps and we're working together to figure out how to do this as quickly as humanly possible. So, thank you to everyone in the State government who has worked so hard throughout this year, Governor Cuomo and his whole team, we appreciate all the work we've done together. And we are going to, together, find a way to push harder and we're all together going to push the federal government to do its share and the manufacturers to do their share, so we can really go into overdrive here.
All right, now, there’s a lot of good news, a lot of good news ahead. 2021 is going to be a good news year, but 2020 is going to go down in history as one of our saddest, toughest years, arguably the toughest year in the history of New York City. Thank God we all came through those of us who made it, but we got to remember those who didn't make it. We got to remember those we lost, and we've got to be there with their families every day. All the families who lost loved ones, my heart goes out to you. You're in our thoughts and prayers all the time. We know this has just been incredibly difficult to go through this pain without the chance to mourn in so many cases, without the chance to be with loved ones. So, it's important that we have a day of remembrance. It's important that we have a day going forward in the future of the city to always remember what happened in 2020, to remember those we lost, to honor them, to honor their families. And, of course, at the same time, remember all the heroism, all the people who did so much good to protect people. The day we lost our first New Yorker to COVID in this year was March 14th, 2020, next March 14th, 2021 will be a day of remembrance in New York City. We need to recognize 25,000 of our fellow New Yorkers gone. That's something we have to always mark going forward. And we got to remember them by one, being there for their families, by two, honoring those who did so much to try to save them and three, by working to make this city better all the time in their memory. So many we lost were victims of the disparities and inequality in our society and this is not a shocking statement to anyone who's been watching. So many people we lost had never gotten enough health care in their lives and didn't get their fair share no matter how hard they worked. So many people we lost were victims of still too much discrimination and racism in our society. We lost people of every background. We lost people of every income level. Every neighborhood, this tragically was a disease that affected everyone, but it did not affect everyone equally. So, on March 14th each year, we remember also the painful lessons we learned but it’s a time to rededicate ourselves to making a difference and changing things. A day to look back, but it will always also be a day to look forward and say, how can we do better so we never lose people again, and we have a city that is there for everyone going forward.
So before – I now move forward to what we do every single day, which is our daily indicators. I do want to take a moment since it's a very special time of year, obviously we've had holidays of many faith, traditions, Christmas, and Hanukkah, and so many important holidays that people have celebrated, so many times when people restored faith and hope. And we of course are looking forward to tonight and tomorrow, but here we are still in Kwanzaa, and it's so good to talk about Kwanzaa and the Kwanzaa principles. And this is something we're really highlighting this year. We're going to do in a very big way next year, because these principles say so much to us, so much positive, so much helpful, and that is really moves us forward and helps us think about where we need to go. Each – at the beginning of the day, the phrase Habari Gani, which means what's the news? And then the answer is the principle of that day, today is Kuumba, and that means creativity. And I want to celebrate the creativity of New Yorkers, the resourcefulness, the ingenuity of New Yorkers in the year 2020. It was unbelievable. The things people did this year to help each other. Talk about making a way where there was no way. In the year 2020, New Yorkers had to create like never before, whether you're talking about what our health care heroes have to do to protect people and save our hospital system and our first responders, what they had to do and the incredible challenges they overcame. Or you’re talking about the way this city ended up creating its own ventilators, its own PPE, its own processing labs for tests, things we didn't have before. We created them all here, New York City know-how and we did it in record time. That's what New York City is all about. And just the way people helped each other and the way people expressed their own personalities, their own hope, their own belief, whether it's the design of a face mask or the ways people celebrate and supported each other, the cultural activities put together to support people, give them hope. This was a year for creativity if there ever was one. So, a lot to be proud of when it comes to the creativity of our people and we're going to see it blossom in 2021.
Now we're going to go to our indicators. I'm going to, again, as we go through indicators, put a bit of a qualifier on that we've seen some pretty aberrant numbers the last few days. We obviously had the situation, a lot of people getting tested in advance of the holidays and then during the holidays test numbers were uneven, so you get a different kind of sample. But that being said, even though these numbers look somewhat skewed, they are still very cautionary and it’s important we focus on them. So, first, number one, daily number of people admitted to the New York City hospitals for suspected COVID-19, today's report 199 patients. Obviously, the goal was 200, so we're just there. We want to drive that down. Hospitalization rate per 100,000, still way too high, 3.93, we want to get that back under two. Number two, daily number of new cases for COVID-19 seven-day average, today's number 3,259, way too high against the goal of 550. And number three, percentage of New York City residents testing positive for COVID-19 seven-day rolling average, very high number today, 8.87 percent. Again, that is probably aberrant based on uneven testing with the holidays, but still cautionary and troublesome and something we need to focus on, something we all need to act on. We want to get that number below five percent and keep driving it down. So, what can you do? You just heard your doctor, the people's doctor, tell you if you're thinking about going to some kind of large holiday gathering, just don't do it. I will borrow from Nike and modify the phrase, just don't do it. It doesn't make sense. Next year, you'll be able to celebrate all you want if we get this right, but if people keep getting sick because of doing the wrong thing, it's not going to speed our days of recovery to say the least. So please avoid large gatherings tonight. Keep it small, keep it simple. Stay home, stay close. Let's be healthy. Let's help each other. A few words in Spanish.
[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]
With that – and Feliz Año Nuevo while I'm at it. With that, let's turn to our colleagues in the media. Please let me know the name and outlet of each journalist.
Moderator: We'll now begin our Q-and-A. As a reminder, we're joined today by Dr. Chokshi, by Deputy Mayor Melanie Hartzog, by Dr. Katz, and by Senior Advisor Dr. Jay Varma. The first question today goes to Hazel Sanchez from WCBS.
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