Delays in the U.S. rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine is being affected by website crashes and tech glitches, according to The Hill.
The report comes as the Trump administration enters 2021 well short of its goal to vaccinate 20 million people by Jan. 1. So far, just over 17 million vaccine doses have been distributed in the U.S., but only 4.8 million people have received their first doses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday.
Website crashes affected several Florida counties Monday, and Texas’ largest county had to take its website down due to ineligible residents attempting to book slots.
“Clearly we do not want technological glitches to get in the way to fully implement a national vaccination plan,” Nicol Turner Lee, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, told The Hill.
“I think [the] government needs to really think about how to overhaul systems so it can accommodate what has essentially become the new normal, which is online,” she added.
The challenges are not new, says Leah Vriesman, the executive director of Executive Education Programs in Health Policy and Management at UCLA.
“If we succeeded with [coronavirus] testing — and through so many lessons learned with how to ramp up doing thousands and thousands of tests a day — to me the analogy is we should be doing the same thing with the vaccine,” Vriesman said.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.