At Least It's Working? Outrageous Waits On State Vaccine Website

Boston MA

25 February, 2021

9:02 AM

Description

The state vaccination website is holding up — technically — as residents scramble for tens of thousands of appointments that opened Thursday morning. The website hadn't crashed as of 9:15 a.m. — an improvement over last week's debacle — but massive wait times rendered the site almost unusable as people jockeyed for the 50,000 new appointments opening at mass vaccination sites. People were reporting wait times of tens of thousands of minutes shortly after the appointments came online at 8 a.m. State Sen. Becca Rausch shared a constituent's experience of being greeted with a wait time of 86,113 minutes. "THIS IS RIDICULOUS!" the Millis resident wrote. Times appeared to be wildly fluctuating without explanation. Most users were greeted by a virtual waiting room, which is meant to help "appointment scheduling sites work smoothly for all users," according to a message on the site. The appointments were almost filled up by 9:30 a.m., the state said. Whether being told to wait more than 5,000 minutes is an improvement over not being able to get online at all is up for discussion. The latter was the case last week, when the website crashed on the first day those 65 and older and with certain medical conditions were eligible to make appointments. Gov. Charlie Baker said later in the day he was "pissed off" at the site failures, which came as a criticism toward his administration's vaccination rollout crescendoed. PrepMod, the company behind the website, apologized and took "full responsibility" for the site crash. Baker later today will sit before an oversight committee to testify about the rollout. The state on Wednesday announced 11 new regional vaccine collaborations with different hospitals and communities across the state. Patch will update this story