California spent $50 million for a COVID vaccine scheduling website. It flopped

The good news: More than one-third of all eligible California adults have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The not-so-good news: Few of them scheduled their jabs using the $50 million MyTurn website that the state specifically designed to help residents book vaccination appointments.

“Only 27% of vaccinations booked each day use MyTurn,” wrote Barbara Feder Ostrov of CalMatters, who described the state-funded website as “a lightning rod for many Californians frustrated by their inability to get vaccinated quickly and return to a normal life.”

“It’s so unnecessarily inefficient,” Matt Haney, a member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, told Feder Ostrov. “I do believe it’s creating a lot of stress and anxiety, and it creates equity issues.”

MyTurn, initially pitched as a one-stop-shop where Californians could easily schedule vaccination appointments, appears to have instead become the state’s latest bumbling technology fiasco. CalMatters reported that the site has been used to schedule an estimated 100,000 appointments a day, but that’s not enough to help the vast majority of Californians.

“The technology was hastily deployed, leading to inevitable glitches because it wasn’t vetted enough before it was unveiled,” wrote Feder Ostrov. “It can’t reliably cope with the state’s constantly changing rules and wide variety of local eligibility qualifications. And the vaccine supply hasn’t kept up with demand, so until very recently, appointments were unavailable for most people.”

In most cases, Californians are finding their way to vaccination clinics via local resources like community clinics, medical centers and universities. In Sacramento, for example, UC Davis Health opened up vaccine eligibility to everyone 16 and over nearly a week before the state opened up its eligibility requirements.

Similar scenes repeated in cities and counties around the state. Local governments, community clinics and pharmacies appear to have been faster and more efficient in scheduling vaccine appointments than the state’s centralized, complicated and expensive mechanism. Many people report receiving notice of their eligibility via MyTurn days or weeks after they’ve already received the vaccine.

On Thursday, Sacramento-area appointments seemed scarce on the MyTurn site, with the exception of some appointments available in Fair Oaks on Saturday.

Most counties around the state expressed strong skepticism about the Newsom administration’s plan to make one company, Blue Shield of California, responsible for the state’s entire vaccine regime. Some counties refused to sign the state’s contract until they received assurances that they could still control vaccine distribution in their own communities.

“We don’t need more bureaucracy; we just need more vaccine,” said Santa Clara County Executive Jeff Smith, whose county declined to sign an agreement with Blue Shield and instead relied on its own vaccination system.

Such skepticism now appears to have been well-founded.

CalMatters described the system as “largely overseen” by Blue Shield of California, but a spokesman for Blue Shield clarified that the MyTurn scheduling site administered by Accenture. The consulting firm will be paid up to $18 million for its work on the site, according to CalMatters.

The contract was one of many no-bid contracts handed out to big healthcare companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some political ethics experts have raised concerns because massive contracts worth billions of dollars went to companies that have also generously supported Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political campaigns.

Perhaps it was unavoidable that the state would, out of necessity, try and fail to develop a tech solution to help get millions of Californians vaccinated as quickly as possible. Sadly, in the birthplace of Silicon Valley, in the 21st century, it appears the best the state could do was spend $50 million on a high-speed and half-baked website that won’t help most Californians.

This story was originally published April 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.