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Monday, January 25, 2021

UCLA Needs a New Vaccine Rollout for Eligible Employees - Part 2


Yesterday's post dealt with problems in UCLA's "system" for allocating vaccinations to eligible employees.* It brought forth anecdotes as a response. One person found an unsolicited invitation on her myChart app. Since that person wasn't expecting it and hadn't been looking at the phone app, the invitation had expired. That person was able to get someone to revive the expired invitation.

Another person - an eligible UCLA employee due to age - had the same problems that yours truly described yesterday, i.e., jumping through silly hoops and then not getting to the promised next step. That person decided to go to UCLA-Santa Monica's vaccine site in person to see if a shot would be provided despite not having received an appointment. The request was met with a refusal at Santa Monica by the person in charge. But at UCLA-Westwood's site, the strategy worked and a shot was given.

Both of these tales have happy endings for the individuals involved. But both stories suggest that there really isn't a consistent system in place.

Oh, and by the way, there are folks at UCLA who have no real connection with providing health care to patients but who happen to have "mednet" email accounts and who are getting shots via unsolicited invitations. 

Maybe all of these problems are inevitable in a bureaucratic distribution system. But yours truly has been told - again anecdotally - that at UC-Irvine things are running much more smoothly.

Yours truly managed to get an appointment via LA County at the Forum on Tuesday. How did it happen? Someone called me and said County options had just reopened and I should quickly get on the County website. It worked. A report on a local NPR station this morning indicated that the County's slots were exhausted after about 30 minutes.
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