Remembering the lives lost to coronavirus
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I appreciate the insight of Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott in asking Johnson & Johnson to sell COVID-19 vaccines directly to the city (“Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott asks Johnson & Johnson to sell COVID vaccines directly to city,” Feb. 8).
Reading between the lines it is clear that Mayor Scott has a stunning lack of confidence in the Hogan administration to distribute the vaccination in an equitable fashion.
Gov. Larry Hogan is already on record in the Washington Post as disparaging Baltimore residents as unwilling to get vaccinated.
This is one 67-year-old city resident who has been trying to get a vaccination appointment since I became eligible on Jan. 26. I, too, share Mayor Scott’s wholesale lack of confidence in the Hogan administration.
Case in point was the Friday before last, where at 8 a.m., I received a text that appointments could be made at the Six Flags facility in Prince George’s County. I rushed to my computer, which flourished appointments every couple of seconds.
But whenever I attempted to make an appointment, the website replied, “Something has gone wrong.” After about an hour of this, I attempted to call the one phone number offered in the state which was always busy.
Contacts with both the Prince George’s County and Baltimore City health departments and all of my delegates from the 41st legislative district were in vain. Nobody had any idea what was going on.
By around 3:30 in the afternoon, I found out what had happened when I got through to the phone number. Apparently, 10,000 people contacted the website in the first seven minutes and then the website crashed.
Of course, the hundreds and thousands of folks trying to make appointments were not informed that the website had crashed.
The next day, Governor Hogan ended up in the papers taking credit for this as a civic success. To the people who spent most of a morning attempting to make appointments on a crashed website, it was anything but a success.
Mr. Hogan was quoted in your article about Mayor Scott’s idea as saying “nice try but it won’t happen.”
Well, Larry, Feb. 5th’s appointments didn’t happen either, but at least if Mayor Scott cannot secure the coveted Johnson & Johnson vaccines, I doubt he will style this as a success.
At a time where one’s mortality has never been more at stake, we have websites that don’t work, mail that isn’t being delivered and a governor who doesn’t care about Baltimore.
Jurgen Klopp composed himself, gave a little chuckle, and rubbed his nose. The Liverpool manager had just seen his team collapse at Leicester to a 3-1 loss — a third straight defeat in its faltering defense of the English Premier League trophy — and Klopp was being asked if the defense was over, even with three months left in the season. “Yes,” Klopp eventually said. “I can’t believe it. But yes.” Indeed, Liverpool’s meltdown has been bewildering over the last six weeks. Since a 7-0 thrashing of Crystal Palace just before Christmas, the champions have won just two of their 10 games in the league and are drowning in their defensive shortcomings. They find themselves in fourth place and 13 points behind relentless leader Manchester City, which beat Tottenham 3-0 later Saturday for an 11th straight league win. City still has a game in hand over Liverpool and secondplaced Leicester, which is seven points adrift. “I don’t think we can close that gap this year, to be honest,” said Klopp, whose team could actually even struggle to finish in the top four.