The city’s struggles with its rollout of the monkeypox vaccine to New Yorkers continued Tuesday when the website to schedule appointments went down due to “overwhelming traffic.”
The New York City Department of Health announced Tuesday at 1 p.m. that more monkeypox vaccine appointments were available, but within half an hour, the department tweeted that the scheduling website was down.
Due to high level of traffic, the scheduling site is currently down. We are aware of this issue and working to restore it quickly. https://t.co/cxbo5dePtt
— nychealthy (@nycHealthy) July 12, 2022
In a statement later in the day, the city Health Department said the site “delivered error messages for many people” due to “overwhelming traffic” as soon as appointments went online.
The department confirmed just before 4:25 p.m. Tuesday that all appointments that were made available had been booked, and added that they will “advise New Yorkers when more appointments can be made.”
“This is just further proof that demand is very high, and we will continue working to make vaccine available,” the city’s statement reads, in part.
“We apologize for the frustration caused and are working to build stable appointment infrastructure as we roll out more appointments as vaccine supply increases in the coming weeks,” the statement continues.
Tuesday’s hiccups with the process came after “technical difficulties” prevented many people from scheduling an appointment to get vaccinated last Wednesday.
Some New Yorkers scheduled their vaccine earlier in the day due to what the department called a glitch that made appointments available “prematurely.”
“The website issues [Wednesday] were caused by Medrite, the company who runs the vax appointments page. It was an error with their page that caused the outage,” City Hall said in a statement Wednesday.
The department later revealed appointments made earlier in the day would be honored.
Due to an unfortunate glitch, monkeypox vaccine appointments were made available prematurely. Rest assured, more appointments will be available this afternoon, and we will update here and on our website when they are available.
— nychealthy (@nycHealthy) July 6, 2022
The state Health Department said on Tuesday that New York has reported 238 cases of orthopoxvirus – which the state Health Department refers to as "likely monkeypox" cases “because of the rarity of all orthopoxviruses, generally, and the presentation of symptoms, in confirmed orthopoxvirus cases, being consistent with monkeypox.” According to the state Health Department, 223 of those cases are in the city.
The CDC says monkeypox is “rarely fatal,” but it can lead to fevers, headaches, muscle aches and backaches, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion. It can also cause “a rash that can look like pimples or blisters that appear on the face, inside the mouth and on other parts of the body, like the hands, feet, chest, genitals or anus,” according to the CDC.
Monkeypox cases are primarily spreading among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, but the Health Department says anyone can spread the virus through direct contact with a rash or sores.