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65+ LA County Residents Can Now Sign Up For Vaccine Appointments, If They Can Get The Website To Work

Screenshot from VaccinateLACounty.com
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Starting today, L.A. County residents 65 and older can book an appointment to get a COVID-19 vaccine, with slots open as early as Wednesday.

Appointments are available at the county's five "super sites," as well as at smaller distribution sites.

To sign up, eligible L.A. County residents should visit http://VaccinateLACounty.com or call 833-540-0473 between 8 a.m. and 8:30 p.m.

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The expansion comes after county Board of Supervisors chair Hilda Solis signed an executive order to expand the pool of currently eligible vaccine candidates to that age group.

Just last week, county public health director Barbara Ferrer said health officials would not be able to offer vaccines to all seniors until vaccinations for essential health workers were complete — that wasn't expected to happen until early February at the earliest. L.A. County still has to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of health care workers.

Last week, Ferrer said she wished she could offer vaccines to more people, sooner, but the county simply did not have enough doses from the state and had requested more to no avail.

Mayor Garcetti and Gov. Newsom have said it's not California's fault; they place the blame on the federal government for not giving states enough vaccine doses, which is causing a logjam. President-elect Biden says he plans to fix that in his first 100 days.

Today Ferrer spoke about the new appointment system, cautioning that the vaccine supply is still limited, so appointment slots will only open a few days in advance:

"It will require patience, because we haven't received yet all of the doses that we'll need to vaccinate the priority groups. And we, too, are looking forward to a new administration and more transparency on how many doses will be available in the future."

Ferrer said the county has enough doses to get through this week, but don't yet know how much they'll receive from the federal government next week.

Users have already complained that the appointment site isn't working properly or is down completely.

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Multiple attempts to sign up elicited error messages that the CalVax server – the site that allows users to actually book an appointment – was down.

If you're confused (as you should be) about all of this, we made a timeline:

The county public health department is holding a town hall tonight at 6 p.m. We're sure they'll have plenty of questions to answer.

READ MORE ABOUT LOCAL VACCINATION PLANS:

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