Early Reports Indicate Vaccine Appointments Not Going Well, Again

Ed. Note: They’ll be another chance Saturday for those in priority zip codes (see below) due to yesterday’s malfunction.

Some early reports from this morning: “and today the Captcha is broken.”

“DC has got to do something different with this vaccination portal. Who is being held accountable for this ongoing failure?!”

“Captcha not working on DC vaccination website. Keeps telling me it’s incorrect when it isn’t. Happened three times now.”

“The perks of knowing http errors: got through past 1 page of the DC Covid Vaccine system and got a 503 error (system is overloaded or down). Cool cool cool cool.”

“Made it past the captcha and got this” (above)

From DC Health yesterday:

“We apologize for the issues with the vaccination portal this morning. The District’s COVID-19 vaccination appointment portal did not perform as expected due to a technical review failure that resulted in eligible residents with a qualifying medical condition being unable to register. As the IT team worked to stabilize the website due to heavy traffic, there were delays in finding and fixing the issue with the eligibility criteria.

We know how stressful of a time this is, and we regret that this unfortunate situation occurred on a day when many of our residents with chronic health conditions were newly eligible for vaccination appointments. The technical review failure has now been addressed, and with tens of thousands of residents newly eligible for the vaccine this week, we are currently working with Microsoft in anticipation of extremely high traffic during future appointment releases.

The portal and call center will open as scheduled for all eligible individuals on Friday, February 26, at 9:00 a.m. There will be 4,350 appointments available. We are also adding a registration session on Saturday, February 27 at 9:00 a.m., for eligible residents with qualifying medical conditions in priority zip codes. There will be 3,500 appointments available. Appointments can be scheduled by visiting vaccinate.dc.gov or calling 1-855-363-0333.

We know that the vaccine we currently have available is not enough to meet the demand among our residents and workers. Therefore, we will continue to advocate for DC to receive more vaccine so that any resident who wants a vaccine can get one. Our goal is to facilitate an equitable and efficient distribution of the vaccine.”