Got Your Covid-19 Vaccine? Now Cancel Your Extra Appointments

In North Carolina, a county health director has been going door-to-door to find takers for missed slots. A Midwest retailer shut down its wait list and tasked employees with weeding out people who made multiple appointments. On social media, it is increasingly common to see posts from health departments offering shots to anyone who can show up at a vaccine site.

“It creates a mad dash at the end of the day,” said Raynard Washington, deputy health director of Mecklenburg County Health Department in North Carolina. As many as 10% of people don’t show up at vaccination sites run by the county—or hundreds of doses a week—partly because they don’t cancel multiple appointments.

Appointments remain tough to score in many parts of the country even though the overall supply of vaccines and the pace of inoculation are improving. Some people are making multiple bookings in hopes of getting vaccinated sooner or sometimes because they don’t receive or see confirmation emails, according to pharmacies and community vaccination sites. Others receive shots at pop-up vaccination events before scheduled appointments and don’t notify providers.

The U.S. lacks a concrete system of tracking wasted doses. Generally, local and state officials say that demand is high enough that no-shows aren’t leading to tossed vaccines, though vaccine providers say they sometimes fail to find takers for all the doses they have thawed in time to use them all safely.

Dr. Washington and his colleagues have knocked on doors and gone into a local grocery store looking for people willing to get vaccinated because of no-shows. When his team recently had leftover doses at a church vaccination event, they went to a construction site across the street and offered them to workers there.

Mecklenburg County officials are urging residents to cancel extra appointments and simplified the cancellation process on its website earlier this year, Dr. Washington said, adding that they now overbook appointments by roughly 10% or more to ensure no dose gets wasted.

Pharmacies say multiple bookings and subsequent no-shows can slow down the vaccination process by creating more work for their staff. Many have hired and trained employees to administer Covid-19 inoculations in recent months, dedicating more operating hours for vaccinations and establishing hotlines to assist customers with questions.

CVS Health Corp. has a set of practices in place to avoid wasting doses because of no-shows, the company said. Vaccines aren’t drawn from a vial until patients arrive for their appointments and, if there are leftover doses, the pharmacy scours patient profiles to find potential takers. If that fails, the chain offers shots to employees.

At Weis Markets Inc., pharmacy staff have to hunt for other store employees or customers to receive shots if people don’t show up 15 to 20 minutes after their appointment, said Jonathan Weis, chief executive of the company. “There are folks who are gaming us” by scheduling appointments at three to four providers, Mr. Weis said. “It is cruel and mean.”

While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact factors behind no-shows, pharmacies and some health officials say they are looking through the back-end of their appointment lists to get ahead of the problem. Charlie Hartig, chief executive of Hartig Drug Stores in the Midwest, said his chain temporarily closed its wait list to remove duplicates and got rid of nearly 40% of names after cross-referencing immunization legislations.

Wait lists, though, remain a key way for people to score appointments. Lori Wolok Charlton, who lives in Westland, Mich., registered on multiple wait lists including at some retail pharmacies after being unable to find any openings within an hour or so of her home. Last week, she got a call from a mass vaccination site in Detroit and received her shot, just in time to return to work at an insurance agency.

A number of people have taken to social media to complain that they are unable to cancel appointments either because they can’t reach anyone at vaccine sites or because the online scheduling systems though which they booked don’t allow it.

Albertsons Cos. and other retailers say their scheduling systems detect duplicates and ask customers to cancel or don’t allow for more than one appointment under the same email address. Still, pharmacy staff will check with customers if there are other concerns with appointments such as typos.

“It’s hard to stop or control the general public’s enthusiasm to find the vaccine,” said Lori Raya, SpartanNash Co. ’s chief merchandising and marketing officer who oversees the pharmacy business. SpartanNash said it has had success with opening up time slots about four days before vaccine appointments because the tight time frame doesn’t allow for much room for people to play with scheduling.

In Detroit, one of the biggest vaccine operations in hard-hit Michigan has seen hundreds of no-shows since opening last week. Roughly 15% of booked appointments didn’t show on the first days the site, at a downtown football stadium, was open. That day, though the site administered fewer shots than it had capacity for, no doses were wasted, state officials said. Organizers have since started overbooking appointments to ensure as many people as possible are vaccinated.

CVS and Walgreens Boots-Alliance Inc., the nation’s biggest drugstores that together have administered more than 20% of the nation’s vaccine doses, have centralized appointment-booking systems that don’t connect with one another or with state and local systems.

Walgreens said vaccine demand is high enough that pharmacies are able to find takers for missed appointments. The company said that scheduling issues should largely resolve when vaccine supply is plentiful enough that all the chain’s roughly 9,000 locations can administer shots.

Pharmacies and health officials are mixed on whether greater eligibility would limit multiple appointments or increase them. In Arizona’s Coconino County, which expanded eligibility to all people 18 and older about two weeks ago, multiple bookings were a bigger challenge in February, said Kim Musselman, the county’s health and human services director. She and her colleagues took to social media and urged residents not to hoard vaccine appointments.

They also introduced a wait list for extra doses about three weeks ago and started contacting people on the list earlier in the day.

“We understand the anxiety around getting a vaccine appointment,” she said.

Corrections & Amplifications
Multiple bookings were a bigger challenge in February in Arizona’s Coconino County. An earlier version of this article incorrectly named it Coconico County. (Corrected on April 7)