Maine launches vaccination pre-registration site as eligibility expands

State health officials launched a website on Tuesday that will allow Maine residents age 16 or older to pre-register for vaccination against COVID-19 and eventually schedule appointments.

But the new system will not be the statewide, centralized registration and appointment system envisioned during the early weeks of Maine’s vaccination campaign. Instead, the new site is still under development and appears geared toward smaller or newer vaccination providers that do not already have easy-to-use online platforms for booking vaccination appointments.

“Right now the goal is to get as many people registered as quickly as possible,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “So this platform . . . will fill in a gap. It will not be meant to supplant existing scheduling platforms. “It will rather fill in a gap for sites that would like to be doing more vaccination but are dissatisfied with their own existing scheduling platform or for places that would like to come online but have no scheduling (site).”

The new website is vaccinateme.maine.gov.

A spokesman for MaineHealth, which operates more than a half-dozen vaccination clinics around the state, said the health care network plans to continue operating its own registration and appointment system. While information technology staff are working to integrate the two platforms, individuals who want to be assured a place on MaineHealth’s list should still pre-register with that network.

“MaineHealth has built a system that allows individuals to register with us in advance of being scheduled for a COVID-19 vaccination,” spokesman John Porter said in a statement. “Starting in January when vaccinations were opened to those 70 and older, we have been continuously investing in this system to enhance the user experience, adding new features and capabilities, including online scheduling. The system ties directly into our electronic medical record and has been a critical part of building a vaccination infrastructure that can accommodate up to 36,000 shots, including up to 18,000 first doses, per week — significantly more than the current allotment of vaccines available from the state.”

The state did a “soft launch” of the new website, without any advance publicity, on the same day that Maine residents between the ages of 50 and 59 became eligible for vaccination. The expansion means an additional 164,000 Maine residents can now sign up for shots as state officials anticipate larger shipments of vaccine arriving in Maine in the coming weeks.

A total of 369,484 people — or roughly 27.5 percent of Maine’s population of 1.3 million people — had received at least one shot of vaccine as of Tuesday morning while 16.5 percent have received either both of their Pfizer or Moderna shots or the single-dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Federal distributions of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are expected to be less “robust” than hoped for next week but Maine could see a larger, one-time shipment of Pfizer doses. Shah said he is hoping for “a pretty big week and a half” as the state begins chipping away the 50- to 59-year-old age group while continuing inoculations of older Mainers, educators and others who were previously eligible for shots.

“We are already seeing strong demand and we are hoping for an increase in our vaccine supply,” Shah said. “I’m hoping that means we can really accelerate that rollout.”

The Maine CDC reported 131 new cases of COVID-19 on Tuesday as well as two additional deaths.

The 131 cases is among the lowest numbers reported by state health officials in nearly a month and reduces Maine’s seven-day, rolling average of new confirmed or probable infections to 200.

To date, the Maine CDC has tracked 48,773 confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19 since the coronavirus was first detected in the state last March. The number of Maine residents whose deaths have been linked to COVID-19 stood at 731 on Tuesday with the two additional deaths.

This story will be updated.