A mass vaccination of the population is crucial for efforts to vanquish the COVID-19 pandemic and return life to normal.

It makes sense for the national government to roll out its own vaccination program to supplement those carried out by municipal administrations to expedite progress.

But the program could hamper, rather than help, local government attempts to inoculate the population if it increases the burden on health care workers and causes confusion.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s administration, which is leading a policy campaign to accelerate the pace of vaccinations, should operate the mass vaccination program carefully while closely monitoring the local government situations.

Mass vaccination centers for seniors set up in Tokyo and Osaka by the central government are now up and running. The Tokyo and Osaka vaccination centers will seek to give shots to up to 10,000 and 5,000 people aged 65 or older per day, respectively, for the time being.

The shots at these sites are being given by doctors and nurses with the Self-Defense Forces under a program Suga announced four weeks ago without laying the sufficient political groundwork in advance.

Suga unveiled in rapid succession plans to complete the inoculations of Japan’s 36 million seniors by the end of July and administer 1 million vaccinations a day.

The Suga administration’s push for faster vaccinations through support to local governments reflects its desire to improve the environment for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics this summer.

The national government’s preparations for the mass inoculation program were clearly inadequate as indicated by problems with the booking system, which cannot prevent people from double-booking appointments to get their shots with both municipalities and the state-run venues.

Since the system requires people to enter their vaccination ticket numbers, municipal governments in Tokyo and Osaka, which are sending out these numbers in turn, received complaints from citizens who have yet to receive them.

Some of the municipalities were forced to accelerate the process or go to the trouble of notifying complainants of their numbers.

Even before the national vaccination program was launched, use of two separate government systems for monitoring and managing vaccine supplies and inoculation records placed a heavy administrative burden on local governments. The Suga administration needs to avoid any measure that would add to the burden.

The embarrassing glitch in the booking system that allows people to make vaccination reservations using false information was reported by Asahi Shimbun Publications Inc. and the Mainichi Shimbun, which signed up to test the system using fictitious information.

The Defense Ministry criticized the media organizations for their "malicious and very regrettable” acts.

But these organizations made reservations using arbitrary code and application numbers as part of the reporting process of confirming the existence of the flaw and later canceled the reservations.

Their efforts for exposing the problem did not deprive any eligible people of their opportunities to receive shots. Their reports on the flaw with the booking system served the public interest and the ministry’s protest was unreasonable.

At the Tokyo and Osaka centers, people receive shots of the vaccine developed by Moderna Inc., which was approved by the health ministry last week under a special approval procedure based on clinical testing overseas.

While the vaccine jointly developed by U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. and German biocommerce company BioNTech was first used on medical workers before being administered to the public, the Moderna vaccine will be immediately used to inoculate a large number of elderly people in the coming weeks.

That makes it important to carefully monitor the health conditions of those who have received shots and quickly publish information on any side effects.

A growing number of prefectural governments and major ordinance-designated cities are racing to set up their own mass vaccination sites.

The national government needs to share with these local governments lessons gleaned from the snafu and complaints concerning the booking system for the state-run vaccination program and lead efforts to fix the problems.

--The Asahi Shimbun, May 25