(Bloomberg) — Less than 30 minutes after New York City released online appointments for the monkeypox vaccine, the site crashed due to high traffic.
Shortly after the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene opened its vaccine scheduling site on Tuesday at 1 p.m.
local time, users online reported that the website had crashed and was inaccessible. By 1:29 p.m. local time, the NYC Health Department confirmed on Twitter that the site was down and it was working on a fix.
The city released 1,250 vaccination appointments online.
By the afternoon, all the slots were fully booked, the department said. It will provide another 1,250 slots through direct referrals from providers for higher-risk New Yorkers, according to a press release. Another 620 doses will be directly distributed to people with a suspected or confirmed monkeypox diagnosis, identified by the Health Department through its contact tracing efforts.
These shots are the remainder of the 6,000 doses of Bavarian Nordic A/S’s Jynneos vaccine allocated to New York last week. A person is considered fully vaccinated against monkeypox after receiving two doses of Jynneos, spaced about four weeks apart.
New York City has 223 confirmed cases of monkeypox, a quarter of the 866 confirmed cases nationwide, according to data from the city’s health department as well as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, health experts have warned the US is undercounting cases due to limited testing.
Later this week, the city is scheduled to receive another 14,500 doses from the US government.
The shots are distributed proportionally to states and jurisdictions based on case numbers. High-risk groups, such as men who have sex with men or members of the LGBTQ community, are still the CDC’s top priority for vaccination.
(Updates with slots being fully booked in third paragraph.)
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