The city will open up 17,000 monkeypox vaccine slots on Friday as part of its latest round of appointments, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said Thursday. 

New Yorkers who meet the city’s eligibility criteria will be able to sign up for first-dose appointments at 6 p.m. on Friday, July 22, either through the city's vaccine portal or by calling 877-VAX-4NYC, the department said in a press release. 

Vaccinations will kick off on July 24 and run through Aug. 13, the release said. 

What You Need To Know

  • The city will open up 17,000 monkeypox vaccine slots at 6 p.m. on Friday, July 22

  • Vaccinations will kick off on July 24 and run through Aug. 13

  • As of Thursday, 778 people in New York City had tested positive for monkeypox, the health department said

Three mass vaccination sites — one at Science Skills Center High School in Brooklyn, one at I.S. 125 in Queens and one at the Bronx High School of Science — will administer 10,600 of the 17,000 doses on July 24, July 30 and July 31, the health department said. 

Vaccines will also be administered at the city’s sexual health clinics in Chelsea, East Harlem and Corona, at Gotham Health, Vanderbilt on Staten Island and at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, according to the department. 

“Additional doses will be set aside for referrals from community-based organizations serving higher-risk New Yorkers (3,850), and the remaining doses will be used for provider administered vaccinations and contacts of known cases identified through Health Department contact tracing,” the department said in its release. 

As with the city’s last round of vaccinations, the latest round will only be open to “gay, bisexual or other men who have sex with men and transgender, gender non-conforming, or gender non-binary persons ages 18 and older who have had multiple or anonymous sex partners in the last 14 days,” due to limited vaccine supply, the department noted. 

The city received nearly 26,000 monkeypox vaccine doses from the federal government earlier this week, according to the department. 

As of Thursday, 778 people in New York City had tested positive for the disease, health department data shows.

“The Health Department is moving quickly to distribute as many vaccine doses as we can in the most equitable way possible,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, said in a statement Thursday. “With cases rising, it’s clear that there is a great need for more vaccine in New York City, and we are working with our federal partners to obtain more doses.”

The health department’s announcement Thursday came shortly before the activist group ACT UP NY was set to hold a protest in Foley Square to highlight what it described as “federal government failures” surrounding the monkeypox vaccine rollout. 

“The latest monkeypox outbreak didn't need to happen,” the group, which formed in the 1980s to take on the AIDS crisis, tweeted. “WE DEMAND: More testing. More vaccines. More treatment.”