‘Viral’ vaccine naming links are a big problem and Dallas should have realized that

The Dallas city fiasco at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center on Saturday – with cars stretched for blocks in an endless line and elderly residents allegedly forced to do their sanitary needs by the road – is Aesop’s fable for the COVID-19 era. .

Just a few weeks ago, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson criticized Dallas County officials – the city’s public health partners – for the complicated implementation of the Fair Park vaccination center. The county suddenly admitted visits over 75 years old after canceling hundreds of unauthorized appointments that had been booked through an insecure registration link. Johnson was outraged and wanted us to know that.

“It is not clear how or why this type of failure was possible and why the county had no safeguards for that,” Johnson wrote on January 17.

However, the same thing happened under his supervision when he administered the distribution of the first vaccine in the city. City officials sent out invitations for appointments to 10,000 people for 5,000 doses, pending no-shows and layoffs. Instead, predictably, the invitation link was widely shared, despite a useless warning that it shouldn’t be. As a result, 17,000 desperate souls, eager to be vaccinated, clicked on it.

The breach contributed to the chaos at the convention center on Saturday, when many elderly people stood in cars for hours and at least one man said he needed to relieve himself on the street.

On Monday, Johnson was forced to apologize to a bunch of reporters. We take no pleasure in their problems, but perhaps a dose of humility will inspire better leadership by a mayor who often opposes antagonism or rivalry with other leaders when this crisis requires our leaders to work together in every way possible.

Rocky Vaz, the city’s emergency management coordinator, told us that city officials had to act quickly as soon as the state announced that Dallas would obtain its own vaccine supply. The city chose off-the-shelf programming software used by other vaccine suppliers.

“We quickly realized that there was no security there, as happened with the municipality, but we had no choice because we had to start vaccinating people,” he said.

The city underestimated how many people would share the link, Vaz said, and even though city officials frantically canceled unauthorized consultations, more consultations occurred.

The state is asking hub providers to use their full dose allocations each week, and we understand that the urgent task of vaccinating people requires improvisation. But the city’s willingness to risk the same programming errors as Dallas County is yet another blow to the collapse of public confidence. Several people who thought they had confirmed commitments said they were confused and “devastated”. A man whose 85-year-old mother waited in line on Saturday unsuccessfully told WFAA-TV (Channel 8) that his mother will stay at home and will not try again.

While Johnson was pressing the state to give Dallas his own share of vaccines, he should have planned this. The “viral” sharing of naming links is a common problem. Houston hospitals described the problem to reporters in early January. If Dallas employees had called Houston Methodist Hospital, the city might have learned, like us, that on the first day of sending vaccine invitations by text message to the hospital, the scheduling link was shared 1,000 times across 15 minutes. The director of the system’s quality program, Courtenay Bruce, told us how the Houston Methodist used technological maneuvers and additional language to make the problem “almost non-existent”.

Remembered on Monday of his criticisms of the county, Johnson told reporters that the city acted quickly, although the county, as a public health official, had “almost a year” to plan a vaccine. We expected to hear a strong promise to work with the city’s partners to rebuild public trust.

Still, we are happy that the city has joined the Methodist Health System for the next round of vaccines. Showing the humility to ask for help is the moral of this story.