I am also in Massachusetts, and the vaccine sign-up process is indeed a sad, sad joke. To obtain appointments, I needed to monitor at least a dozen different websites, and had to enter my data over, and over, and over again on multiple sites. Some sites allowed you to continue entering data even when appointments were no longer available. Getting an appointment was a test of endurance, computer skills, computer speed, screen size, typing speed, and, of course, luck.

Considering that our state has some excellent universities, world-renowned hospitals, a governor who used to run a health insurance company, and at least 6 months to prepare, it is a total embarrassment to see how poorly the vaccine roll-out went. To put an exclamation point on it, in short order, a few bright volunteers have pulled together friendlier sign-up systems than the Commonwealth provided.

Charlie Baker, our governor, was completely tone-deaf on the matter. He seemed to think that since vaccine supply was limited, of course getting an appointment would be difficult, so he did not seem to understand the complaints. What he failed to grasp was the ridiculous time and effort people were needing to put into searching for a vaccine.

For example, it would have been conceivable to have a system whereby you enter your info (name/age/location/insurance info/health status etc.) and are placed in a queue and contacted once a nearby vaccine appointment is available. That would take 10 minutes up-front, and you'd be free to get on with other things in the interim. But instead, we had random appointments popping up all over the state, and no queue, so you had to constantly search or there was no way you'd get an appointment.

So Baker was right that many people would not get vaccines, but there is a vast difference between spending 10 minutes and failing to get a vaccine, and spending 10 hours and failing.