Elizabeth Warren criticizes vaccine website, says Charlie Baker hasn’t responded to calls for preregistration system

Elizabeth Warren is criticizing the Baker administration’s vaccine rollout, saying hours after its appointment-finder website crashed that the state shouldn’t have been surprised by the overwhelming demand.

“Well, yeah, this was the first day that a million new people were eligible for vaccines here in the state. Of course there was high demand at the opening,” Warren said, sighing. “I just don’t understand how you couldn’t have a system built for that.”

Warren lamented the website woes after touring the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center’s vaccine clinic at La Colaborativa in Chelsea — where things were running smoothly Thursday afternoon.

She said Gov. Charlie Baker has yet to respond to the letter she and her colleagues sent last week urging him to create a centralized preregistration system for appointments — a rare show of force against the governor from all but one member of the federal delegation.

The current system is “adding to people’s anxiety, because they’re up early in the morning, they’re trying to search one website and another, they don’t know if their town is the place to look, or the town over, or the center down in Boston, they don’t know where they’re going to have to drive, or for some people whether or not they will have access to transportation to get to these big centers,” Warren said.

“One thing that we could do to make this just easier for the folks in Massachusetts is let’s have a centralized system that anybody can tap into,” she said. “They can find out what they qualify for, they can see where the available appointments are and make it work.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3pvIOSJ