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The baseball team’s Citi Field stadium-turned-vaccine site is reportedly getting a Bronx cheer — and is set to receive a fraction of the number of COVID-19 shots that Yankee Stadium is getting at its hub.
Mayor Bill de Blasio fielded questions from a reporter during a press briefing Tuesday about why Citi Field in Queens was getting only a total of roughly 800 doses to dole out over its first four days when it opens Wednesday.
That’s just 200 shots a day — a piddling compared to the number reportedly being administered daily at the Yankees’ home-turf facility in The Bronx.
The mayor at first responded that the Yankees site is a joint state-city venture, suggesting his administration didn’t have as much control over how many doses it was receiving.
He was then asked if that meant that the city was worse at managing its own sites without state help.
“The state still controls the vaccine distribution,” de Blasio replied, referring to the fact that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration gives municipalities their doses, which in New York City’s case is about 43 percent of New York’s allotment.
It was unclear whether the state tells the city how to divvy up its cache among its own sites. City officials have not responded to The Post’s questions about the set-up.
The reported glaring disparity comes even though de Blasio crowed about opening Citi Field as a vaccine hub weeks ago — well before plans for Yankee Stadium were solidified.
Citi Field opens for the first time Wednesday and closes down again Saturday at 6 p.m. as part of its opener four-day-a-week, round-the-clock run.
Yankee Stadium opened as an immunization hub Friday.
The mayor said more vaccine doses would be directed to Citi Field — in a borough that was once the epicenter of the country’s coronavirus crisis — as the supply increases.
“I want to see more vaccine shifted, of course, to the Citi Field site,” the mayor said. “The goal over the next few weeks is to get it [operating] 24/7.
“We’ll keep moving vaccines in that direction as we get it,” he said.
“Right now, this month, we’ll be at a rate of [being able to handle] half a million vaccines per week, that’s the capacity, but the amount of vaccines we’re getting is so far below that, and we just have to make choices within it.
“We’re dealing, as we have throughout this crisis, with federal decisions, federal red tape, state decisions, state red tape,” the mayor said.
Additional reporting by Bernadette Hogan
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