The Big Apple’s Health Department is finally switching to the city-built mass vaccination system to handle future monkeypox appointments, a change that amounts to a major course correction from the agency amid growing frustration over the outbreak.
It comes just hours after an investigation in The Post cast doubt on the repeated explanations offered by DOHMH officials about why they’d opted to once again use tech-challenged private vendors over Vax4NYC, which was built by city employees and contractors to replace those companies and unify its vaccination efforts during the early days of the coronavirus vaccination campaign.
DOHMH revealed the switchover on Thursday when it posted the link for the next set of appointments, which are set to be released Friday evening at 6 p.m.
A spokesman for the agency replied with a simple “yes” when asked to confirm the changeover.
Initially, the agency sought to contract out the work, as it did during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic — first to Medrite, which holds a $36 million COVID-era contract to provide vaccine-related services to DOH.
Officials then moved the contract to Affiliated Physicians for the third round of appointments after Medrite’s struggled during the first two.
But the changeover led to DOH’s biggest monkeypox-related technology meltdown as New Yorkers battled for more than an hour to simply be able to log onto the website, only to then contend with additional crashes and glitches that made it extraordinarily frustrating to book an appointment.
Officials had repeatedly argued — claims reiterated by Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan as recently as Wednesday — that the city-built system was a bad fit for monkeypox vaccinations because it could handle dozen of sites simultaneously, while only three clinics were set up to dispense the shots.
“It’s astounding that one year after the city scrambled to get vaccinations up and running that they’re repeating every single mistake,” said one frustrated former city official retorted. “The city can’t control how many monkeypox vaccinations they get. But they can control making sure they have a website that doesn’t crash.”
