Mexico’s vaccination site crashes again as doses run out
“403 Forbidden.”
That’s the message you would have gotten this morning when trying to access Mexico’s vaccination registration website. The site crashed at least four days in a row.
Authorities have said the number of people seeking to register overloaded the government site’s servers.
People who managed to catch the website at a good time still had to pass a Captcha “I am not a robot” test in English, asking them to pick out photos of objects like curbside fire hydrants that don’t exist in Mexico, or objects like chimneys, which look very different in this country.
Website glitches were just the beginning, this week. Mexico reportedly ran out of COVID-19 vaccines. The country has received about 760,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The 89,000 remaining doses were set aside to give as follow-up shots for those who had their initial inoculation.
Mexico posted a near-record daily death toll of 1,682 Thursday, bringing the total to 162,922. Authorities also announced that about five cases of the more contagious U.K. variant had been found in Mexico, some apparently through local transmission.
Mexico is lining up shipments of the Pfizer and Russian Sputnik vaccines, but no new doses are expected to arrive until mid-month.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador posted a video Thursday saying he had tested negative on an antigen test. AMLO had tested positive for COVID-19 about 12 days before.
