Town vaccinates 69% of residents 75 and up

REDDING — The town continues to experience confusion with the vaccine registration system, despite getting first doses to well over half of residents 75 or older.

The town has vaccinated about 69 percent of those in the 75 or older age group and opened up its registration to those 65 or older, said Doug Hartline, health officer.

Still, “the phone is very, very busy,” he said.

Residents continue to call the health and social services departments with questions or issues about the Vaccine Administration Management System, a federal system known as VAMS that Connecticut uses.

Human Services Director Angelica Fontanez said her office has reached out to get residents into the system, but repeatedly experiences the same issues.

Fontanez can assist people registering for the Bethel-Redding clinics by taking down their information and entering it into their system herself, but that is not the case with VAMS. Since VAMS requires a unique email address, it is ultimately up to the residents to sign up.

Residents signing up have to pre-register in VAMS with their names and email. After pre-registering, VAMS sends them an email with a temporary password to log in. This is the point where issues have surfaced.

“Somehow, there’s a gap with the process,” Fontanez said. “Either they’re [the residents] not getting the temporary password or maybe it’s going through spam. So it’s a bit of a wait.”

Fontanez has also seen some confusion after residents get the temporary password when VAMS asks if the individual is already registered.

“A lot of people are making the mistake of saying ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’ because it wasn’t a registration when they did the first one, it was a preregistration,” Fontanez said.

When residents mistakenly answer “yes,” VAMS will sometimes lock them out of the system, making them wait. Often, appointments are full by the time residents can get back into VAMS.

“Just getting into the VAMS system is a struggle and getting an appointment,” Fontanez said. “Because what has happened, for example, when 75 and up opened the first time around, it seems if you got into the system within the first three hours, you can get an appointment pretty easily. But then after that, it was hard to find any local appointments. Everything got booked up very quickly.”

The town can only vaccinate so many residents at its local clinic with limited doses coming in, leaving others to register and find an appointment through VAMS.

Hartline said another problem to note is VAMS’ incompatibility with different browsers.

“VAMS should have on the front page that Internet Explorer is not compatible with the signup,” he said.

He recommends switching to Google Chrome or another browser.

Redding is among several towns in the area making headway in its vaccination efforts, according to state data.

Roxbury has done the best, vaccinating all of its 75 and older residents. Danbury, a much larger city, has done the worst, vaccinating 40.2 percent.

Bethel, which is partnering with Redding on its vaccine effort, has given first doses to 46.2 percent of those 75 and older. Ridgefield has vaccinated approximately 79 percent, while New Milford is at 50.3 percent and Easton is at 42.4 percent.

Although towns have started opening up registration to the next age group, the percentage of the overall town population to be vaccinated remains low. Most towns have inoculated less than 15 percent of their overall populations.

Here are where towns in the Greater Danbury area stand in their distribution of the vaccine.