ALBANY COUNTY — County officials on Friday called on the state to loosen restrictions on how COVID-19 vaccines are dispensed.

“We need more physicians that are doing vaccinations in their offices,” said the county’s health commissioner, Elizabeth Whalen, at Friday morning’s press briefing.

She noted, “Physicians can sign up to be New York State COVID-certified vaccinators.” The “fairly simple” paperwork, she said, is available through the state’s health department.

“It’s important to vaccinate people where they’re comfortable and not everybody is comfortable going to our PODs,” she said of points of dispensing.

The county regularly runs a large POD at the Times Union Center in Albany, which administered 881 first doses on Wednesday and 873 second doses on Thursday.

Altogether so far, Albany County has administered or reallocated a total of 51,046 first and second doses of vaccine.

Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy said, of vaccine doses, “In the beginning, we had the demand; we just didn’t have the supply.” Now, he said, the situation is reversing. “As President Biden continues to roll out … more and more vaccines, we need people to step up,” said McCoy.

He anticipates a time, McCoy said, when he and Whalen, in their regular COVID press conferences, will be “begging people to come out and get the vaccine.”

McCoy urged, “Help us move forward … We need to get over 70 percent of residents in Albany County being fully vaccinated.

Expert opinions on the percentage needed for herd immunity runs from 70 to 90 percent.

So far, according to the state’s vaccine tracker on Friday evening, 47.9 percent of Albany County’s 301,117 residents have received a first dose of vaccine. McCoy reported on Friday morning, 33.3 percent of county residents have been fully vaccinated.

Statewide, 40.2 percent of New Yorkers have received at least a first dose and 27.0 percent have completed a vaccine series.

McCoy raised another issue looming on the horizon of vaccination efficacy.  He noted that the chief executive officer of Pfizer has said — in comments released Thursday — that people will “likely” need another dose of vaccine within a year of first being fully vaccinated, and it’s possible they may need annual vaccination as with flu shots.

Researchers don’t know how long protection lasts.

“We need to open this up to doctors’ offices,” said McCoy. He also said that, while the logistics of running smaller PODs can be difficult, people feel more comfortable using them.

Whalen noted that this was the first week that appointments for vaccination at the county POD didn’t fill up within five minutes of the openings being posted online. Walk-ins were admitted to fill the slots.

“We are now getting to the point where we are really having to look at how we can broaden the amount of people that we are vaccinating,” said Whalen.

She thinks a lot of the hesitancy may have been the pause on using Johnson & Johnson vaccine. On Tuesday morning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration issued a statement recommending the pause and New York State immediately followed.

Six American women had suffered a rare clotting disorder — one of them died — after being vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson. The clotting disorder looks to be similar to the disorder that European authorities have said is possibly linked to AstraZeneca, a COVID-19 vaccine not yet cleared in the United States.

Both of those vaccines use a cold virus to carry the coronavirus spike gene into the vaccinated person. On the other hand, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use messenger RNA, training the body to recognize the spike protein on the surface of the coronavirus.

Whalen said her office was swamped with questions after the pause was announced.

“This is a concern,” she said of the clotting disorder, “but it is an incredibly low risk.” She noted that six individuals out of the 6 million Americans vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson had suffered from the disorder.

“I believe that the pause will give us opportunity to look at this in a more systematic fashion and gives us better information on whether this vaccine is appropriate to be reintroduced and, if so, are there certain populations that should or shouldn’t get it,” she said.

Whalen surmised that interest in vaccination in Albany County would return to “normal” after the Johnson & Johnson pause.

But she also said it is important to remove barriers to vaccination.

“It’s important to vaccinate people where they’re comfortable and not everybody is comfortable going to our PODs,” she said.

She said, too, that it is important to “work to combat the abundance of misinformation that is available, particularly on social media.”

Whalen said her department is starting to look at data to find pockets of people in the community who have not been vaccinated to see if education efforts can be targeted.

She also said that “health ambassadors” who are “trusted messengers” within their communities will talk to people about their hesitancy.

Another barrier for some, Whalen said, is computer sign-up. She said many of the walk-ins at the last county POD “were really grateful” that they didn’t need to go through an online process.

“You need your ID and you need to show up,” she said.

Whalen stressed the importance of vaccination and still following protocols like hand-washing, social distancing, and mask wearing.

Whalen concluded, “We are still seeing people suffer with COVID. We are still seeing younger people suffer with COVID,” said Whalen. “We are seeing hospitalizations and we are seeing deaths so COVID is not finished with us.”

Empire Center report

Also on Friday, Bill Hammond, senior fellow at the Empire Center, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit think tank based in Albany, released a report showing that a committee appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo to verify the safety of vaccines authorized by the FDA had found they were safe.

“The governor’s six-member Clinical Advisory Task Force, which is co-chaired by a Nobel laureate, issued formal statements on the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in December and on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in February,” Hammond wrote.

“Although Cuomo briefly announced each of the task force's decisions shortly after it was made, the panel’s statements have remained unpublished until now,” he went on. “The existence of the statements did not come to light until the Executive Chamber recently turned them over to the Empire Center under the state's Freedom of Information Law.

“Why these reports stayed hidden is a mystery. Sharing them with the public would have been more consistent with Cuomo’s stated goal in establishing the task force — which was to reassure New Yorkers that the FDA's scientific judgments had been scrutinized by independent experts.”

Hammond also wrote, “Although the task force's statements contain no surprises, they include expert perspective that New Yorkers might have found reassuring or enlightening.”

Newest numbers

On Friday, McCoy announced 68 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the county’s tally to 23,223.

Of the new cases, 45 did not have clear sources of infection identified, 21 had close contact with someone infected with the disease, one reported traveling out of state, and one was a health-care worker or resident of a congregate living setting.

The five-day average for new daily positives has increased slightly to 52.6 from 52. There are now 482 active cases in the county, up from 471 on Thursday.

The number of Albany County residents under quarantine increased to 907 from 905. So far, 74,666 people have completed quarantine. Of those, 22,741 had tested positive and recovered. That is an increase of 53 recoveries since Thursday.

There were three new hospitalizations overnight and 29 county residents are now hospitalized from the virus — a net decrease of one. There are currently six patients in intensive care units, unchanged from Thursday.

Albany County’s COVID-19 death toll remains at 369.

In Albany County, as of Thursday, as a seven-day rolling average, the infection rate is 2.8 percent, according to the state’s dashboard.

Statewide, also as of Thursday, as a seven-day rolling average, the infection rate is 3.0 percent.