The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hoping to make it easier for Americans to find COVID-19 vaccines, is supporting the testing of a centralized online portal where the public can search for nearby vaccination locations with available doses.
The website, called Vaccine Finder, is run by Boston Children’s Hospital with the help of several contributors. It emerged from the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic and has been used for years to coordinate the distribution of flu vaccines and children. It was expanded on Wednesday to include the availability of coronavirus vaccines in several states.
If the program goes well, the site’s developers plan to expand it across the country in the coming weeks to include almost all vaccine suppliers who agree to be introduced. This would make the site much more comprehensive than anything that exists now.
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“We are trying to create a reliable website and bring some order to all this chaos and confusion around availability,” said John Brownstein, a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital who runs VaccineFinder.org.
The project is not a panacea. It will not allow people to make appointments; it simply directs people to other portals where they can try to register to be vaccinated.
Nor does the site address the main restrictions – mainly the limited supply of vaccine doses – that are preventing more people from getting vaccines quickly. And there is a risk that adding one more vaccine site will only exacerbate the current confusion.
“It is not a tool that will necessarily make things easier for people to get the vaccine,” said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers. “They will see where the vaccine is, but they will still have difficulty getting an appointment.”
After a difficult start, the vaccination campaign in the United States has accelerated in recent weeks. Seventeen percent of adults received the first dose and 7.6% are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. This puts the government on track to deliver on President Joe Biden’s promise that at least 100 million doses of vaccine would be administered in the United States by his 100th day in office; since then, he has increased that target to 150 million doses.
Despite progress, however, getting vaccination appointments has been a major frustration for many people. The available times are filled in a few minutes after being made available. States, local health departments and pharmacy chains have their own registration sites that, in many cases, do not share data with each other. The CDC has its own vaccine administration management system, or VAMS, that some states are using to get people to register for vaccinations and to collect essential data, but state officials have complained that it is clumsy.
Exasperated people solved the problem with their own hands, creating online navigation tools and groups of “vaccine hunters” on Facebook in cities like Los Angeles and New Orleans to help connect people with available doses.
When the Vaccine Finder portal goes live this week, it will include some drugstores and grocery stores across the country, as well as many other locations, such as mass vaccination sites in Alaska, Indiana, Iowa and Tennessee.
Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the CDC, said the agency was encouraging vaccination sites to “provide accurate and up-to-date information on vaccine locations, times and availability so that Americans can find vaccination sites more easily.”
Dr. Marcus Plescia, medical director of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, said: “I think people are optimistic and look forward to it.” He continued: “As with anything we launch in the middle of this pandemic, if there are failures, it can end up creating a lot of confusion, but I think we will have to resolve this.”
Finding the doses was relatively simple in the first few weeks of the vaccine’s launch, when eligible people – health professionals and residents and staff at long-term care facilities – were being vaccinated mainly where they lived or worked.
But since then, states have expanded their eligibility criteria to include older people, people with certain medical conditions and certain frontline workers. More sites have also been added to distribute vaccines, including stadiums and local pharmacies.
The federal government did not create a centralized registration system for launching the vaccine, and states were slow to establish their own. In this void, counties, local health departments, pharmacy chains and other vaccine providers have started their own appointment scheduling sites, in some cases adapting systems they already have and in others buying new tools from providers.
These systems are often not synchronized to share information like the people who registered on their websites. This frustrated local and state health officials, who are unable to cross off their lists from people who made an appointment at a different location after registering with various systems.
“It is more difficult to track vaccination appointments and offer them to the people who need them most when systems are so disjointed,” said Blaire Bryant, associate legislative director for health at the National Association of Counties.
Federal and state lawmakers have called for more centralized registration systems. Congressman Anthony Brown, D-Md., Introduced legislation last week that would create a nationwide registration system, where the public can register to be vaccinated.
More states have started registering sites in the past few weeks, but these systems typically do not allow people to book a vaccine or appointment directly. Instead, they help people navigate existing systems or sign up to be notified when they can schedule an appointment.
The Vaccine Finder website aims to complement, not replace, these efforts, said Brownstein, who is also the director of innovation at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Google launched the first version of what became the Vaccine Finder website. In 2012, Brownstein and his team took control. Since then, they have worked with state and local authorities to identify locations that offer routine vaccines. The project received federal funding of about $ 1 million a year to maintain the site, first from the Department of Health and Human Services and, since 2017, directly from the CDC. The U.S. government has provided more than $ 8 million to help expand the vaccine site COVID-19.
The Vaccine Finder allows people to enter their zip code, the distance they are willing to travel and which authorized vaccines they are looking for.
This information generates a dotted map of nearby vaccination sites, with links to appointment scheduling sites created by states, local health departments and pharmacy chains. Vaccine providers can choose not to be featured on the Vaccine Finder. For example, a provider may cancel vaccination if it is only vaccinating a certain portion of the population, such as health professionals.
The website will show which sites have doses available, based on data that vaccine sites must report daily. The need to report this information daily “can be a huge increase and lead to varying degrees of accuracy in the system,” said Adriane Casalotti, head of government and public relations at the National Association of Municipal and Municipal Health Authorities. “As with everything, the value will be in the quality of the data provided,” he added.
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
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