Long lines, web mishap make for messy day of vaccinations for seniors at Jackson
COVID vaccine distribution continued to be plagued in Miami Tuesday by long waits, confusing web portals and hours spent refreshing web pages as frustration mounted.
Miami-Dade County’s Jackson Health System portal for vaccine appointments was full minutes after its official opening time of 11 a.m. Some seniors and their families reported they had been able to register for an appointment as early as 9 a.m., hours before the advertised launch time.
Users took to social media, sent email and made phone calls to complain that the site went live earlier than planned, leaving many without an appointment. And even for some who did get appointments for Tuesday afternoon, there was disappointment when they were told to come back the next day.
WPLG-Local 10’s Glenna Milberg reported that Jackson security announced to people in a vaccine line at the Christine E. Lynn Rehabilitation Center in Miami that there had been “a glitch in the count,” meaning there would not be enough vaccines for everyone who signed up.
In a video Milberg tweeted, a number of people in line yelled in protest.
When asked by a Miami Herald reporter why people were being turned away, Jackson CEO Carlos Migoya at first insisted it hadn’t happened.
“If you have anyone who has said that, I would like to know who that is,” he said during a countywide virtual press conference. “We have not run out of vaccine. We have taken everybody there and we have not turned anyone away from any of our lines. We have plenty of vaccine left.”
Migoya later clarified, saying that Jackson workers were running out of time, not vaccines, and those in line weren’t turned away, but were given the option to come back the following day.
Maria Kelly, 73, was one of the people hospital staff members tried to turn away Tuesday, but she stayed in line anyway and received the vaccine.
“Getting in was really, really hard,” she said in Spanish.
Kelly said she got to the rehab center where Jackson is offering the shots at about 2:30 p.m. for a 3:15 p.m. appointment that her son scheduled for her Tuesday morning. Before 3 p.m., she says hospital staff tried to cut off the line, but she and a few others decided to stay. She eventually received the vaccine and was out of the center around 5:15 p.m.
But many people were not so lucky. Those who waited until 11 a.m. — when Jackson had said the portal for appointments would open for business — found they were too late. The site had gone live by 9 a.m. and most of the appointments were already taken.
“Knowing that other providers have been overwhelmed by sudden spikes in calls or web traffic, we were able to launch our system slightly early,” the spokeswoman wrote.
That explanation didn’t help people like Dianne Walsh, 68, of Miami, who said she tried to schedule an appointment through Jackson Health’s online portal for more than an hour without any luck.
She was able to get through the first part of the form, which requests the patient’s name, date of birth, email and partial Social Security number.
“It’s hard to be on these websites constantly when you have a job and are supposed to be working,” Walsh said.
She also tried to get her 90-year-old mother an appointment in Broward County with no luck. Broward Health appointments also filled up within a day of becoming available last week, and slots are full through February. And on Monday, the Florida Department of Health in Broward County announced that it no longer had any appointments available for its drive-thru vaccination sites either.
And that demand for the vaccine was apparent at the new Jackson sites: the Christine E. Lynn Rehabilitation Center in Miami, the North Dade Health Center in Miami Gardens and the Jackson South Medical Center in Kendall.
On Tuesday, a message posted on Jackson’s website said that more than 12,000 vaccine appointments had been booked. The sites will be open seven days a week, with an initial goal of vaccinating 2,000 seniors a day. Jackson spokeswoman Lidia Amoretti said additional appointment slots will open up as Jackson receives additional vaccine supplies.
New appointments for the week of Jan. 11 will be added, Jackson said, and anyone interested should continue to check Jackson’s COVID-19 web page throughout the coming days.
The vaccine being given through Jackson Health System is the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which requires two shots, three weeks apart.
The messy rollout comes a day after Gov. Ron DeSantis publicly put pressure on the hospitals to vaccinate as many people as possible, warning that those who didn’t use up their portions of the state’s allocation of doses risk a reduction in supply.
“If you have hospitals like Jackson that are meeting or exceeding their targets then we are going to send them more vaccines,” he said. “If you have other hospitals who are sitting on it and not using it, then future distributions will be reduced accordingly.”
New vaccination sites to come
With booked-up appointments at Jackson and other hospitals, including Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach and Memorial Healthcare System in Broward County, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava confirmed at a county press conference Tuesday that drive-up vaccinations are coming to Hard Rock Stadium soon. Other sites will also offer vaccines, she said, though she did not disclose the names.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez tweeted Tuesday afternoon that the city is in the process of repurposing Marlins Park into a vaccination center as well, similar to the way it was converted into a testing site.
In Miami Beach, Mount Sinai Medical Center CEO Steven Sonenreich said the system plans on adding two new vaccine distribution sites at the hospital’s emergency rooms in Aventura and Hialeah. With the new sites, the hospital would be able to increase its vaccine distributions from 650 per day to 2,000.
Baptist Health, which has not begun distributing vaccines to the general public, will be announcing an online portal to make appointments soon. CEO Bo Boulenger said Tuesday that “vaccine distribution of this magnitude is a complex process” but that plans will be shared “in the coming days.”
Florida International University has also applied to be a COVID-19 vaccination site in Miami-Dade County, a university official confirmed to the Miami Herald Tuesday afternoon.
Memorial Healthcare System is now offering the Pfizer-BioNTech version of the COVID-19 vaccine to senior citizens at two locations in Broward County, while the county also opened a new appointment-only vaccination site Tuesday at Markham Park & Target Range, 16001 W. State Road 84 in Sunrise.
This story was originally published January 5, 2021 at 12:00 PM.
