‘Shake out every dose’: Crowdsourcing sites help track down available COVID vaccines
Vaccine hunting websites are merging social media savvy with old-fashioned phone calls, popping up nearly overnight to join a growing digital community dedicated to tracking down available COVID-19 vaccines.
“We thought, ‘There has to be some better way.’ We went from conversation to website in less than 24 hours,” said Zoelle Egner, a co-organizer of the California vaccination information site VaccinateCA.com.
The site debuted in January, one of the many crowdsourced vaccine tracking sites and online wait lists that have emerged across a nation where the death toll from COVID-19 surpassed 501,000 as of Tuesday evening, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 49,000 in the state have died from the virus as of Tuesday, California Department of Public Health numbers show.
“VaccinateCA asks three questions (of providers),” Egner said. “Do you have vaccines? Who is eligible to get the vaccines? How do you make an appointment?”
They write down what they get from the medical professionals, verify the information and post it to the site.
“We know there’s availability problems, but you’d be surprised that there are places that you don’t know about,” she said. “It’s hoping that we can shake out every dose.”
VaccinateCA went from a Twitter group of “10, 20 of us trying desperately to find vaccines,” Egner said, to what she estimates as 300 or more volunteers who have since joined the core crew to work the phones and talk with hundreds of hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and other vaccination sites and providers across California to get the latest information on available vaccines and sites.
People behind crowdsourcing sites like VaccinateCA say they are seeking a better way to connect people to open vaccination appointments and to unused vaccines, shaking out those doses that otherwise would be tossed out.
They are far from the only ones. Dr. B dubs itself “the nationwide COVID-19 standby site” identifying excess vaccines. The site recently welcomed fellow venture Vax Standby into its orbit to compete against Chion, another homemade wait list website.
Vaccination numbers in California
More Californians are getting vaccinated — more than 5.5 million have received their first dose and 2 million have their second shot, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More mass vaccination sites are joining counties’ clinics and retail pharmacies such as CVS to get shots into arms.
Californians can sign up at myturn.ca.gov or call 833-422-4255 to find when they are eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. If you are not yet eligible or no appointments are available, sign up to be notified when it’s your turn.
But sluggish vaccination rollouts, spotty vaccine supply, appointment delays and scheduling hassles have frustrated many Californians seeking their doses.
The scenes at Sacramento-area clinics, as reported by The Sacramento Bee, show the lengths some are going to claim vaccination clinics’ extra doses. They’re waiting hours in lines at county clinics at Sacramento State University or Jesuit High School, in Arden Arcade and Del Paso Heights, or signing onto wait lists in hopes that someone misses an appointment and a dose becomes available.
Vaccine doses become available when people don’t show up for their appointments. Once the frozen vaccines are thawed, the multi-dose vaccine vials have just hours of shelf life before they have to be used or thrown out.
State health officials allow providers to dispense doses to groups outside priority tiers when doses are about to expire and after attempts to reach the target groups.
In the month since VaccinateCA went live, Egner left her tech firm marketing job to focus on the site full time. The site continues to evolve, adding information in Spanish, Chinese and Tagalog, with plans to improve the site’s functionality and provide educational materials.
“We want to share specific sites for loved ones and make it as easy as physically possible,” Egner said.
She said reviews from seniors and their families frustrated by the layers of online applications and vaccination delays have been positive.
“We get most excited when we hear from families. We’ve been heartened to hear that we’re helping….There are definitely a lot of loved ones who are helping” family members, Egner said. “But a lot of folks are taking care of themselves. Our goal is to make this as easy to understand as possible — make it clear and simple and make it make sense for them.”
Making sure doses don’t ‘end up in the trash’
Doug Ward calls his site, VaccineHunter.org, a “Nextdoor for vaccines,” referring to the popular neighborhood information-sharing app.
The site’s stated goal: “Getting anyone who’s mobile and ready their first dose.”
With doses still in short supply, vaccine hunters are perceived by some as jumping ahead in line, taking extra, unused doses away from seniors, those more vulnerable to the virus and others in the designated vaccine tiers who might otherwise need it.
But Ward, founder of the Colorado-based website launched this month, views it differently.
“Two weeks ago, I didn’t expect to be such an advocate,” he said. “We wanted to help from Day 1 to make sure that vaccines do not end up in the trash.”
Vaccine Hunter’s online directory links to dozens of Facebook groups, Reddit posts and other crowdsourced sites, including VaccinateCA, and provides tips on how best to find extra vaccine doses.
“They’ve been such a valuable resource for California,” Ward said of VaccinateCA. “They’ve just been an amazing presence — finding where vaccines have popped up.”
The speed with which both sites launched speaks not only to the demand for vaccine amid a pandemic but to crowdsourcing’s community-driven, pop-up ethos.
Ward, who lives in Colorado Springs, said he created the site in part to try to find an available vaccine dose for his mother, who is in her 60s and also lives in the city about an hour’s drive south of Denver.
Ward connected with a Facebook group in New Orleans helping people there and elsewhere track down inoculation locations where vaccine doses lay idle.
Brad Johnson led the Louisiana page, NOLA Vaccine Hunters, and the two quickly teamed up.
“He started the New Orleans group, I’m here in Colorado. It’s not just a problem in California, but across the country,” Ward said.
The venture linked to a mushrooming network of similar online organizations that now number nearly 50 groups with more than 31,000 members, Ward said.
“It’s been overwhelmingly crazy,” Ward said of the numbers who have latched onto the network. “It’s not my day job, but it’s turned into quite the big task.”
Ward said homegrown, pop-up sites like VaccinateCA and his Vaccine Hunter have emerged out of necessity, using technology to track down vaccines and quell a still-raging pandemic.
“It’s just these little disconnects where we thought we could roll (vaccines) out very smoothly, but there are all these issues with the rollouts,” he said. “Everyone’s coming through as a community.”
This story was originally published February 24, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘Shake out every dose’: Crowdsourcing sites help track down available COVID vaccines."
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