N.Y.’s Vaccine Websites Weren’t Working. He Built a New One for $50

New Yorkers with tech skills were appalled when they tried to make vaccine appointments for older relatives. They knew there was a better way.

By Sharon Otterman of The NY Times. Excerpt:

"Huge Ma, a 31-year-old software engineer for Airbnb, was stunned when he tried to make a coronavirus vaccine appointment for his mother in early January and saw that there were dozens of websites to check, each with its own sign-up protocol. The city and state appointment systems were completely distinct.

“There has to be a better way,” he said he remembered thinking.

So, he developed one. In less than two weeks, he launched TurboVax, a free website that compiles availability from the three main city and state New York vaccine systems and sends the information in real time to Twitter. It cost Mr. Ma less than $50 to build, yet it offers an easier way to spot appointments than the city and state’s official systems do.

“It’s sort of become a challenge to myself, to prove what one person with time and a little motivation can do,” he said last week. “This wasn’t a priority for governments, which was unfortunate. But everyone has a role to play in the pandemic, and I’m just doing the very little that I can to make it a little bit easier.”

Supply shortages and problems with access to vaccination appointments have been some of the barriers to the equitable distribution of the vaccine in New York City and across the United States, officials have acknowledged.

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Statistics released recently by the city showed that the vaccine is disproportionately flowing to white New Yorkers, not the Black and brown communities that suffered the most in the pandemic’s first wave.

Only 12 percent of the roughly 210,000 city residents who are over 65 and were vaccinated were Black, for example, even though Black people make up 24 percent of the city’s population.

“The only way they are able to access those appointments is to use a very, very complicated tech platform that in and of itself marginalizes the elderly community that I serve,” Eboné Carrington, the chief executive officer of Harlem Hospital, said at the end of last month. As a result, she said, white people from outside Harlem for weeks had filled most of her available slots.

So some volunteers in New York, as well as in states including Texas, California and Massachusetts, have tried to use their technological skills to simplify that process.

Jeremy Novich, 35, a clinical psychologist on the Upper West Side on Manhattan, started reaching out to seniors after realizing that his own older relatives could not have made appointments on their own.

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“The system is set up to be a technology race between 25-year-olds and 85-year-olds,” he said. “That’s not a race, that’s elder neglect.”"