Hunt for vaccine slots often leads through scheduling maze

PROVIDENCE, R.I. >> The road to a COVID-19 shot often leads through a maze of scheduling systems: Some vaccine seekers spend days or weeks trying to book online appointments. Those who get a coveted slot can still be stymied by pages of forms or websites that slow to a crawl and crash.

The technological obstacles are familiar to L. Shapley Bassen, a 74-yearold retired English teacher and editor in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. She lost track of the hours she spent making phone calls and navigating websites to get appointments for herself and her 75-year-old husband, Michael.

“A lot of us don’t sleep at night worrying about whether or not we’ll be able to get in,” Bassen said.

Technological shortcomings across the nation’s fragmented public health system have frustrated millions of Americans trying to get shots and left officials without a full picture of who has been vaccinated.

“We’re creating an unnecessary amount of human suffering. This could have been avoidable, and we could have done better,” said Tinglong Dai, a professor who studies health care operations at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School.

The White House promised improvements, pledging to establish a new website and an 800-number by May 1 to help people find nearby locations with vaccines.

“No more searching day and night for an appointment for you and your loved ones,” President Joe Biden said Thursday in a prime-time address to the nation.

The administration also promised to send technical teams to states that need help improving their websites. The bottleneck in vaccine demand seems to be easing in some locations, and on Friday the U.S. was approaching 100 million vaccinations. But vaccine slots are sometimes still so hard to obtain that people resort to vaccine hunter Facebook groups and bots that scan sites for open appointments. Vaccine seekers who are not accustomed to those methods and don’t have anyone to help are at a steep disadvantage.

Bassen finally landed a slot at a pharmacy near home for her husband. The website even offered to schedule the second dose, but when she clicked on it, nothing happened.

Figuring it was a glitch, they printed out the appointment-confirmation email. When he arrived, he was rejected. They told him he had to schedule the second shot at the same time as the first.