"The precise opening hours of the online appointment booking service for vaccination will be communicated shortly."
Here is the message that bars the Santé.fr site this Thursday at midday, supposed to allow from today to over 75 years to make an appointment to be vaccinated against Covid-19 from Monday January 18.
First briefly operational, the site began to struggle in the early morning, according to the messages posted and relayed by Internet users on social networks: “Many of you go to Santé.fr.
You may experience slowness during navigation.
"The site indicated" to carry out optimizations in order to facilitate navigation on the site ".
Some Internet users simply came across an error message from their browser stating that the site was "inaccessible".
A little later, it was no longer possible to try your luck with a first warning "the service is under maintenance".
Unable to connect to register my mother on https://t.co/Jo2YZyBkJj: the site is totally saturated, @gouvernementFr has not provided sufficient IT resources.
#vaccinationCovid pic.twitter.com/9SZDdXdE57
- Gilles (@GillesSoubrier) January 14, 2021
The Directorate General of Health denies, however, "a quack" or that the cut of the site is due to a too massive influx of candidates for vaccination: "We were told about maintenance concerns.
The site will be restarted when the operation is completed ”.
The current update would consist of updating the vaccination centers on the website.
No date of resumption of service is provided.
The national telephone number expected this Thursday was also not communicated.
According to our information, it is Prime Minister Jean Castex who will take care of announcing it during his speech, at 6 p.m.
"A rush is quite normal"
In the government, we hope that the French will be patient and understand that not everyone can be vaccinated from January 18 among seniors.
Traveling to Metz before his speech at the end of the day, Jean Castex spoke of “an important day for the start of appointments for people over 75 years old”, while warning: “Things are falling into place , but it will also be necessary to be patient, because obviously that will cause a rush, it is completely normal.
"
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Several weeks or even months will be needed to vaccinate volunteers among the more than 5 million eligible people over 75 years of age.
All this while hoping that the stocks of vaccines available do not put the brakes on further.
The authorities are also counting on the territorial network (general practitioners, town halls) to orchestrate the campaign, to inform them, to limit the rush to national structures.
In the meantime, it was still possible to get a precious sesame on Thursday by calling on one of the three mandated private operators: Doctolib, Maiia and Keldoc.
At midday, it was possible to make an appointment for a person over 75 years old in the Paris region by mid-February.