Matchmaker, matchmaker
Christine Meyer runs her own medical practice in Chester County. A few months ago, his team posted a call on the clinic’s Facebook page, offering help and telling Pennsylvania residents to send emails if they were having trouble making an appointment for a vaccination. In two hours, the office received 1,200 emails, completely crashing the server.
Clearly, Meyer said, she and her team could not meet the demand alone. So, she created a Facebook group called PA COVID Vaccine Match Maker, which combines people looking for appointments with volunteers who can help them navigate the system. (New Jersey Covid Vaccine Info, a Facebook group for Jersey residents, operates similarly, acting as a crowdsourced vaccine scheduling service.)
In the first week, his group had 10,000 members. At the last count, there were more than 40,000. The group’s volunteers scheduled more than 1,400 vaccination appointments for those in need.
“The idea was to really connect people who knew how to work with this system with people who are really struggling with it: older people, people who don’t have access to the Internet, people who just didn’t have the energy to reproduce it – game on” said Meyer. “It’s great to see the community coming together in this way, but it’s also very disheartening to see the need… to see [40,000] people struggling to find a compromise only in our area. “
B. cited a similar concern. “This system was not really built for the group of older people, people over 65 who have no technological means,” he told WHYY.
Each county registration system in Pennsylvania and New Jersey is separate, usually with different online links to pharmacies, private healthcare providers and county-administered clinics. Residents say things are getting more and more confusing to navigate. This confusion, plus the frustration of waiting for an appointment for weeks, can generate what Meyer calls “vaccine envy” – getting angry or upset if someone who looks young and healthy gets the vaccine before you do.
Instead, she encourages residents to remember that “a vaccine for everyone is a win for everyone.” To prevent the spread, most people will need to be vaccinated, so “if your neighbor gets the vaccine and you don’t, that’s still a victory for you,” she told the group.
Meyer spends every night after work on the Facebook group, trying to monitor the dialogue, dispel misinformation about the vaccine and offer medical expertise when it is useful.
Newell said that most of the feedback he got on his website came from people looking for commitments to his parents.
Michelle King, who lives in Fairfield, Ohio, for example, tried to help her parents make an appointment, but was unlucky with the Vaccine Finder. The day she found Find A Shot, she was able to schedule appointments for her parents at a CVS location. Nancy Regan, who lives in Washington, said that before her daughter found Find A Shot, Regan was not so lucky in his research – when she found locations that listed vaccines in stock, she later learned that all appointments had been scheduled.
Newell’s hope is that in a few months his website will no longer be necessary because, once the supply matches the demand, finding a compromise will not be so difficult.
Dr. Meyer agreed.
“Someone asked me, what do you think is the measure of this group’s success … is how many vaccines do you schedule, or how many members do you have, or how many posts per day?” she said. “[But] I think the measure of our success will be when I have to make that final post and say, this group is being archived because it is no longer relevant. Because everyone who wants a vaccine in Pennsylvania has it, or can get it easily. “
She laughed.
“This is going to be the biggest and most commemorative closing day for Facebook groups ever.”