Crashed websites, lines and scams frustrate Floridians looking for vaccinations

MIAMI — After a week and a half of leaving voicemails, writing emails and checking hospital websites, Harvey Rogers is hoping he and his wife are on a waiting list somewhere for a Covid-19 vaccine.

But the 75-year-old lawyer and resident of Pinecrest, an upscale Miami-Dade County neighborhood, is not really sure, since no one has replied.

Rogers, who is diabetic and has high blood pressure, said it’s frustrating.

“You feel the government is not telling you the truth,” Rogers said, adding that if the state and federal governments were more forthcoming about when and where the vaccine would be available there would be less of a “feeling of anxiety and being left out of the loop.”

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In the two weeks since Florida’s governor said the Covid-19 vaccine would be available to residents 65 and over, the vaccination registration process has been inconsistent across county lines, causing chaos, confusion and disappointment among its senior population and their relatives.

The registration process has been disparate and inconsistent: Websites have crashed; hospital phone lines are jammed; and scams have convinced people to pay for nonexistent vaccination slots. In some places, elderly people camped out overnight in hopes of receiving a vaccine.

Florida, with a population of more than 21 million, has had the third-highest count of Covid-19 cases in the United States over the past 7 days, just after California and Texas. It ranks sixth in deaths.

Exacerbating anxiety among seniors, Florida announced last week the first case of the more contagious coronavirus strain, known as B.1.1.7, which was first found in the United Kingdom.

With that in mind, it has become a race against the clock for many older Floridians to get vaccinated.

Part of the confusion is the state never developed a consistent strategy for its 67 counties to implement a vaccination program. While in some counties vaccines were allocated to public hospitals for distribution, other counties were relying on their health department to set up vaccines through the ticketing app Eventbrite.

Although several counties have successfully used Eventbrite to schedule appointments, it has led to scams in others. In Port Richey, north of Tampa, some of the people who showed up at a Covid-19 vaccination clinic in recent days thinking they had appointments found out that their names weren’t on the books, said Melissa Watts, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Health.

Though the vaccinations are free, “people also said they were charged a fee to register,” Watts said in an email. “After looking into it further, we realized there was a fake Eventbrite account being used to scam people out of their money.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how many people were affected, but health officials said they were referring the complaints to state and local law enforcement for possible investigation. Two counties, Pasco and Pinellas, issued warnings to the public.

“Someone created a FAKE Eventbrite account to register for the COVID-19 vaccination. You should NOT be charged to register. Registration is FREE,” the counties said in identical tweets.

A spokesperson for Eventbrite said that the company is “actively exploring how our platform can best support the effort to increase access to vaccines” but cautioned users to verify the legitimacy of any pages.

“We recommend anyone registering for any COVID-19-related event verify and direct questions to their local health service officials,” the spokesperson said.

Some counties said Eventbrite worked well for their residents because it’s easy to use. In Seminole County, people used Eventbrite to scoop up 2,500 vaccination appointments within 30 minutes of when they went live Tuesday morning, said Andy Wontor, a county spokesperson. People who have signed up for the county’s emergency text messages get a text with a link when appointments are available.

In Daytona Beach and Lee County in southwest Florida, thousands of elderly people camped out overnight in long lines after their county health departments announced they would distribute vaccines on a first-come, first-serve basis.

In Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county with the highest number of Covid-19 infections, Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach had been the sole entity administering vaccines to the public until Tuesday. Miami-Dade is ranked fourth in the country for confirmed cases, according to John Hopkins University and Medicine.

Mount Sinai has been inundated with phone calls and has been scheduling about a thousand appointments a day, according to hospital CEO and…