Rush for Pfizer vaccines in Victoria overwhelms booking system and crashes website
Victoria’s expanded vaccination program has been inundated with requests for Pfizer, crashing the website and leaving many unable to reach the call centre.
Victorians aged 16-39 became eligible for the vaccine on Wednesday and they were promised an additional 830,000 appointments would be made available. But many have experienced frustration because of system failures and technical difficulties.
The online booking portal received 50,000 hits a minute, and over 1.3 million contacted the call centre Wednesday morning.
The Victorian premier Daniel Andrews had said an extra Pfizer doses were allocated to the state from the federal government’s reserves.
Naomi Bromley, the state’s deputy secretary of Covid response, said 25,000 bookings had already been made by 9am. But she conceded the system was under substantial pressure and had slowed.
“We have had an extraordinary response to the changes in eligibility that were made yesterday” Bromley said, imploring Victorians to “be patient.”
Even before bookings opened at 7am, people were being placed in a queue due to high demand. The site then crashed.
Those who called the booking centre were told to call back or disconnected.
By 4pm, more than 95,000 people had managed to book an appointment.
Melbourne man Liam Tynan, 26, tried to book his Pfizer jab at 7am but after 40 minutes of the site crashing he called a GP, who allocated him an appointment within two weeks. Twenty-five-year-old Clayton said it was “a massive relief” to finally be able to access the vaccine.
Problems have also occured in New South Wales during the rollout of the vaccine to younger people. Priority Pfizer appointments were made available for people aged 16-39 in local government areas of concern. But reports have emerged of waitlists stretching months and medical centres being forced to cancel dozens of appointments because of a lack of supply.
Dr Margaret Heffernan, a public health researcher at RMIT University, said it was pleasing so many people saw the benefit of the Covid vaccine. But she said delivery problems like Wednesday’s may cause the public to lose confidence in the system, with the risk some may not try to book again.
She said there was also an equity issue for those who struggle with computers or don’t have the language capacity.
“Particularly for recent arrivals – these failures don’t support their accessibility to vaccines.”
Heffernan said there have been missteps “at every level of planning” during the pandemic.
“From only initially ordering the AstraZeneca vaccine to quarantine, international flights, repatriating citizens and now the booking system failure,” she said.
“It’s very disappointing that in a country that’s meant to have a lot of resources that we simply eighteen months down the track are still facing these errors and failures.
“Australian people want to protect themselves through vaccination and shouldn’t be faced with system failures like this, that impact our ability to get the vaccine coverage that we need to resume normal life.”