The whole thing started with my parents. At 69 and 67, they became eligible for the Covid-19 vaccine in Pennsylvania the week of the presidential inauguration. They immediately registered with the local health department and seemed certain that they would be getting a call soon. They did not realize that the situation in Pennsylvania at the time was a disaster – that millions of people were now eligible and there was not enough supply.
I decided to try to help them, but my efforts were unsuccessful. It didn’t take long to realize that trying to schedule vaccinations for my parents was basically turning into a part-time job. I dedicated a few hours a day to the task – enough to make me feel like I was seriously trying, but not so much that I immediately burned. I woke up before dawn, between 5 and 6 am, and worked on the vaccine hunt until around 7:30 am, when my 4 year old daughter got up.
I had time and energy for the task. I had left a high-pressure job in early 2020 to work on my own, so the pandemic hit me and, like so many other women, I found myself mostly looking after my daughter, putting my career on the back burner while struggling to invent ways to make the days and weeks go by, keeping everyone safe and relatively healthy.
At the time, there was no centralized information source or federal implementation, so it took me a few days to catch up on exactly what was going on in Pennsylvania. The state health department posted a digital map with thousands of dots indicating hospitals or pharmacies with vaccines, marked in red (no vaccine) or green (vaccine to be offered). Unfortunately, none of the locations none availability, regardless of color. (They changed all the blue dots and added more colored dots ?! It’s terrible.)
The more time I spent thinking about the state of the launch, the more I worried about losing the chance to save my parents’ lives. If only I had paid attention to the day Group 1a opened to people over 65, I thought. I knew I was catastrophizing and wallowing in my own anxiety, but I couldn’t help it. I was particularly concerned about my mother, who, as a public librarian, was working during the pandemic. But I also had a strange kind of confidence about the whole situation, that I would make it happen for them by sheer willpower.
Every morning, I would crawl out of bed, go down the stairs in the dark, turn on the coffee machine, open my laptop and start working in silence. I had three browsers open: Chrome, Firefox and Safari. I had open guides for Giant, Weis Markets and Wegmans, as well as some local pharmacies and health departments. On my phone, I would open my favorite vaccine hunter group on Facebook, Maryland Vaccine Hunters, where every morning people posted updates on their successes. Next to me, on the kitchen island, was a sheet of orange construction paper taken from my daughter’s art stock that functioned as a glue sheet with my parents’ pertinent information (address, phone, email, DOB) , a list of PA zip codes and reminders of when certain sites are likely to release appointments.
After about a week of research and a week of dedicated research, I got lucky and booked appointments for them. As soon as I confirmed the details, I had an unexpected and immense cathartic release – just sobbing, for about five minutes. Part of last year’s stress has eased. I didn’t realize how worried I was and how much I sunk that concern to spend my days – just as I had to do with my daughter going back to school face-to-face.
It didn’t take long for me to think about sending a text message to my elderly aunt asking if she got a vaccine appointment. The next day, I got one close by. That same day, my parents got their vaccinations. It finally felt like, after a year of a pandemic affecting my life, I had a little control.
The word traveled. My aunt knew people in their 70s who, like her, were unable to find appointments. My parents met a woman in her late 60s who was the only caregiver for her 98-year-old mother. There were other elderly family members in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Friend of a friend’s parents. They were all on waiting lists. I asked for their information and how far they could drive. I had notes with names like “cancer”, “diabetes”, “obesity”, “idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis” and “heart problems”. You didn’t have to list the conditions on most sites to make an appointment, but people wanted me to know.
Every time I got an appointment and was able to schedule someone, it was like a little dopamine crackle in my brain with pandemic depression. I felt powerful. I also felt exhausted. At the end of a successful session, I would be drenched in adrenaline sweat and nervous because of the black coffee I drank while clicking and updating websites for hours. I was so tired that I couldn’t stay awake after 7 pm.
For some reason, people I didn’t know were more stressful to hunt than people I knew. Every time I made an appointment for someone, I was worried about not being able to make another one. I joined a second Facebook group, PA Covid Vaccine Match Maker, and sent my interest in becoming a “finder” for the elderly. There were more than 300 “Locators” and more than 3,000 “Searchers”, and the group prioritized finding appointments for people aged 75 and over. I felt comforted by the community spirit of the groups, by the positivity of the women (all seemed to be women) in search of each other and exchanging tips.
I emailed strangers with screengrabs of their confirmations and told them that I was worried about the weather. I hoped the 68-year-old lady and her 98-year-old mother would be able to come to the appointments because a storm was scheduled to hit the Northeast. People asked me what to expect in pharmacies, and I was only able to tell what I heard secondhand. When people were not happy with what I found for them because it was inconvenient for whatever reason, I let myself be disappointed for a while before trying to find something else for them. In the meantime, the e-mails and thank you cards I received – I will always save them.
Being a vaccine hunter means having an unfair advantage in a very unfair system. I have a laptop, smartphone and reliable Internet access. But, for some reason, I have no confidence in my skills, no matter how successful I am. You would think that the more appointments I made, the safer I would feel, but the opposite is true. Some vaccine hunters boast on Facebook of getting 50 or 100 appointments, but each time I add names to my list, I am concerned about not being able to find appointments for them, as the situation is so challenging, and I feel pressured to deliver quickly. I don’t want to make people hopeful and then disappoint them. Sometimes nominations are disputed for hours and days, and sometimes I see a tweet from one of the vaccine naming bot accounts that I follow and I can spontaneously reserve some in minutes.
In my first three weeks of hunting for the vaccine, I made more than 20 appointments. The Maryland Vaccine Hunters group on Facebook has grown from a few hundred members to almost 50,000. People created websites that scoured the pages of pharmacies for new queries. Apparently, the sites are useful, but I am concerned that they are making it increasingly difficult for normal people to book. Giant has changed its search radius by zip code from 50 miles to 10, and its website launches you after searching for many zip codes; in response, I cleared my cache and opened an anonymous browser. Rite Aid, the most stressful of the pharmacy websites I go to, has you inserting information pages, including an abbreviated medical history, before allowing you to confirm the time and date. In Maryland, I worked for hours to make appointments for the parents of a woman who is married to my husband’s childhood friend. Then I took my daughter to the playground, shaking with adrenaline. I decided it was time to take a break for a week or two. I feel that all I think about is Covid-19 vaccines.
Of course, the scale of the problem exceeds what can be done with Facebook groups, which are essentially mutual aid networks moderated by unpaid strangers. What is needed are top-down structural solutions to the vaccine delivery problems. There are people who do not necessarily have the flexibility to miss work for an appointment and people who cannot drive to get their chance, either because they are stuck at home or because they do not have transportation. Networks of good-hearted strangers trying to help don’t really solve the problem.
To be fair, things seem to get better by the day. States are adding mass vaccination sites and opening phone lines so people without access to the Internet can make appointments. Health departments are analyzing vaccination data and making plans to try to reach communities that are not getting equal access. The federal government is working to increase supply. More and more adults are vaccinated every day. And while the Biden administration says there will be enough supplies for all adults in May, our family is likely to remain in a waiting pattern for another year. Vaccines have not yet been approved for children, and young children like ours are unlikely to be vaccinated until the beginning of 2022. The exhaustive and imperfect risk calculation that we performed last year whenever we left home – this activity is probably “safe, ”This is not – it won’t be over for us anytime soon.
I have taken two breaks from hunting for the vaccine so far, the most recent caused by exposure to Covid-19 in my daughter’s class that forced me to keep her at home in quarantine (luckily she was not infected). It was hard not to think about the two remaining people on my list of vaccine candidates. I was afraid to open my Facebook application because I knew it would be full of posts about open appointments that I was not taking advantage of. After almost two weeks of unplanned hiatus, I set my alarm for 6 am on Monday after daylight saving time, thinking there might be less competition due to the time change, and managed to book both in a few hours.
Part of me wants to close all tabs, leave all Facebook groups, stop following Twitter vaccine bots and that’s it. Honestly, why do I keep doing this? It is exhausting and frustrating. But perhaps the simplest answer is that people keep asking for help and it is good to say yes.