Vaccine rollout was aggravating

By Letter to the Editor on March 3, 2021.

Editor:
The Alberta government’s roll-out of Covid-19 vaccinations on Wednesday, Feb. 24th was made unnecessarily frustrating by lack of candour, efficiency and foresight.
The government had fewer than 100,000 doses available to provide for a group of seniors numbering around half a million persons. Its website was overwhelmed within minutes of coming on-line.
The 811 phone number was also swamped and unreachable for much of the day. Patently the IT gurus in the government’s employ had made no preparations for the likely avalanche of hits and calls.
A more prudent approach might have been to inform the public that there was a great shortage of vaccine and that all the doses available would be restricted to Edmonton and Calgary, for example. Pretending that everyone in the Province had an equal chance to get an appointment was misleading and disingenuous.
Surely it made more sense to use what stocks that were on hand in the two major cities.
By the time I managed to get into the on-line queue, around 10 p.m., I was told that there were 15,000 ahead of me in the line and that I had a 20-minute wait.
So there I sat and until at last I was directed to the appropriate place only to learn that stocks had run out in my location!
How much less aggravating would it have been for me to have been given this information earlier
Were Mr Kenney and his henchmen afraid to let us know what the actual situation was?
David Amies
Lethbridge