NJ teachers, child care, transportation workers to become eligible for COVID vaccine, Murphy says
Written by Matt Arco | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
New Jersey teachers, child care and transportation workers will be eligible starting March 15 for the coronavirus vaccine, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Monday morning.
The governor, appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said it’s “an imperative” to have those people vaccinated and hinted he would provide additional details at his regular COVID-19 briefing in Trenton at 1 p.m. Murphy followed with a Tweet indicating the new group would includes “additional public safety workers.”
“We’re phasing it in over a couple of weeks because we already have a supply-demand imbalance,” the governor said, adding that other essential workers are expected to be added to the eligibility list by the end of March.
“At the head of that list will be educators and folks in day care,” Murphy said. “We’ve got a whole game plan.”
The expanded group includes “pre-K to 12 educators & support staff,” according to Murphy’s Tweet.
New Jersey is expecting an initial shipment of 73,600 doses of Johnson & Johnson’s new one-dose vaccine within days, Murphy said. The same amount is expected in subsequent weeks. Federal health officials approved the use of the latest vaccine on Sunday.
Murphy said he expects that anyone who wants a vaccine would be eligible “several months from now.”
Last month, Murphy announced people older than 65 and people between ages 16 and 64 who have certain medical conditions were eligible for vaccinations.
There are about 4.47 million who meet vaccination eligibility beginning at that time: Two million smokers, 1.47 million people older than 65 and up to 1 million people with other chronic illnesses.
Eligible pre-existing conditions include cancer, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), Down syndrome, heart conditions, including example heart failure, coronary artery disease and cardiomyopathy, obesity, severe obesity, sickle cell disease and Type-2 diabetes.
The state has administered nearly 2 million doses as of Saturday, including 1,295,891 first doses and 663,855 second doses, according to state data. The state has received more than 2.5 million doses from the federal government, according to the Centers for Disease Control.