Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- New York City expanded its weekend clinics to provide free swine flu vaccines to vulnerable groups after low turnout for the program’s debut led to leftover shots and idle workers at the temporary facilities.

The vaccines will now be available to people ages 25 to 64 with underlying medical conditions including asthma, diabetes and chronic heart and lung illnesses, the city’s health department said today in an e-mailed statement. Pregnant women, people in close contact with infants and anyone ages 4 to 24 also are eligible to receive free vaccines.

The free program was designed to vaccinate middle-school and high-school students and can accommodate 500 people an hour at each location. Just 3,495 were vaccinated last weekend, the health department said in an e-mail. Some patients may be concerned about the safety of the vaccine created six months after the new H1N1 virus was identified, said Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Although the strain of the 2009 H1N1 virus is new, the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccines are not,” Hamburg said in a letter today assuring doctors and patients of the safety of vaccine manufacturing process. “In fact, had this new virus emerged a few months earlier, it could have been included as one of the three strains in the 2009 seasonal vaccine.”

Crowds Disperse

At a vaccination site in the gymnasium of Marte Valle Secondary School in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood, only four patients were waiting for their vaccine about 4 p.m. on Nov. 7. Rows of gown-clad health workers sat at tables talking with one another. Officials at the site said a large crowd had arrived in the morning, though many people left because the line was too long and it was too cold to wait around outside.

“Because the first weekend’s clinics did not reach capacity, the city is opening the weekend clinics to adults with underlying health conditions,” said Thomas Farley, New York’s health commissioner, in a statement.

New York City received 800,000 doses of vaccine for swine flu by the beginning of the month, Jessica Scaperotti, a health department spokeswoman, said Nov. 6. Thirty-nine percent was allocated to school programs. About 38 million doses are now available to states, according to the FDA Web Site.

School Program

So far, about 9,000 elementary school children have been vaccinated at schools, the health department said today. The elementary-school program started Oct. 28 and will continue for about eight weeks. Only 22 percent of parents returned consent forms allowing their children to receive either injectable vaccine or nasal spray, Scaperotti said last week. The system has 1.1 million students.

Protection against the seasonal flu requires a separate vaccination. Unprecedented demand for the seasonal flu shot, stoked by increased awareness of the flu, led to nationwide shortages last month. Virtually all flu cases tested in the U.S. in the last week were the new pandemic strain, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

((To locate a vaccination center in New York, click on http://www.nyc.gov/flu or call 311, the city’s information hotline.))

To contact the reporters on this story: Tom Randall in New York at trandall6@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 10, 2009 15:50 EST