23,000 new first dose monkeypox vaccine appointments booked solid within first hour of going live

The new monkeypox vaccine appointments that were made available Thursday at several locations quickly booked up after going live.
Five new vaccine clinics opened, and city officials say this will double the capacity to get people vaccinated.
Of the five, three of them are in Brooklyn -- the Livonia at 506 Livonia Ave., the Jefferson at 1300 Flushing Ave., and NYC Health + Hospitals/Kings County at 686 New York Ave.
There are more than 1,600 confirmed cases of monkeypox across New York state. Gov. Kathy Hochul says they are working with the White House to promote education and also get vaccines out. She says the highest concentration of cases they’re seeing is in New York City.
Eighty-thousand doses of the vaccine are scheduled to be sent to New York City. The governor says 32,000 of those vaccines will arrive in the first shipment, with two more deliveries expected in the coming weeks as shots are handed out.
While efforts to stop the spread are being ramped up at the federal level, local organizations like Equality New York teamed up with the Department of Health to host their second town hall Wednesday night in an effort to keep New Yorkers informed.
They also say they hope to add a clinic in Times Square in the coming weeks.
The outbreak is now considered a public health emergency, which some doctors say will help. Classifying the outbreak allows the federal government to explore different treatment options and vaccine rollout strategies, as well as access funding and resources.
"This will raise the level of the emergency situation, so I'm glad that the government raised the concern as an emergency situation," says Dr. Mohamed Nakeshband, chief quality officer for SUNY downstate. "However, most of the cases are self-limited, there are not many cases where patients have gotten hospitalized."
The federal government says it has secured almost seven million doses, assuring the public that they will continue to roll them out.