Amid a disorganized, decentralized and disappointing implementation of the coronavirus vaccine in the United States, some states and counties are using unlikely tools to deliver the vaccines assigned to as many people as possible. In many Florida counties, for example, Eventbrite has become the only way to apply for the vaccine.
As with almost every aspect of this pandemic, the federal government is leaving it to individual states to distribute vaccines. Each state had to create its own protocol and priority list. And despite having months to prepare for the tremendous task, many health departments still struggle to discover some kind of system – apparently at the last minute – when it comes to ensuring that people who are eligible for vaccines can make appointments to get them.
Unlike many states that are giving vaccines only to people working in high-risk professions, Florida allows anyone aged 65 and over to receive the vaccine, due to a last-minute executive order from Governor Ron DeSantis, who left the actual logistics of distributing these vaccines to local counties and health systems.
“These guys are much more adept at delivering health services than a state government could ever be,” DeSantis told a CNN reporter on Monday.
With millions of beneficiaries suddenly eligible and no state distribution plan, Florida county health departments had to find a way to get as many people to sign up as quickly as possible. Type Eventbrite.
Brevard County, Florida, planned to use phone lines for appointments, but the phone system did not work, according to The Verge. The “only option,” the county told The Verge, was Eventbrite, a site best known for offering tickets to concerts and concerts. Several other Florida counties, including Manatee, Nassau, Collier, Sarasota, Flagler and Pasco, decided to do the same.
While getting vaccines quickly to people on the priority list is certainly a good thing, there are some problems here. Fake Eventbrite sites that charge people to make non-existent commitments has apparently emerged. And relying only on Eventbrite means that people who do not have access or do not know how to use the Internet will not be able to apply to be vaccinated.
Then again, other Florida counties simply decided to distribute the vaccines on a first-come, first-served basis, which led to stories of elderly people camping overnight in hour-long lines to get their vaccines. Hillsborough and Pinellas counties launched their own vaccine registration sites on Monday, which they immediately crashed along with their telephone scheduling services. In comparison to these options, Eventbrite may not look so bad.
The Florida Department of Health did not respond to Recode’s request for comment on whether it is recommended that counties rely on Eventbrite for vaccine applications. Eventbrite did not answer questions about this new use of its platform or how it will treat any personal health data provided by people who apply for vaccines in their service.
Florida is not alone in its approach. Other health departments and facilities across the country have also turned to technology companies to help distribute vaccines. The Louisiana Department of Public Health offers a list of pharmacies with Covid-19 vaccines available in a document on its website that contains a link to the pages of some pharmacies on Facebook. New Jersey’s Ocean Health Initiatives (OHI) created events on Facebook to announce its vaccination distribution events, although eligible recipients must register on the OHI website (not on Facebook). Stanford Medicine of California created an algorithm to determine which of its employees should receive the vaccine first, but most of its residents and fellows were left out of the list, while administrators and people working at home got a job. And the New York State ParCare Community Health Network has prompted patients to apply for vaccine vacancies using a Google form (ParCare is being investigated for vaccine fraud, but this is not related to the use of vaccine forms. Google).
The situation regarding the distribution of the vaccine reflects other occasions during the pandemic when technology companies were hired to do the work that could have been done by public health systems. The United States Department of Health and Human Services hired Palantir to create an entirely new system for tracking health data and TeleTracking, a software company, to run it. Meanwhile, many states have used the exposure notification tool from Apple and Google to enable digital contact tracking applications. The federal government refused to use the tool for a national application.
With this patchwork of vaccine delivery policies and practices, vaccination rates have varied enormously across the country, and no state has done things very well. The federal government hoped to administer the first dose of the vaccine to 20 million people by the end of 2020 – a goal that has not even come close to being achieved. The Washington Post reports that of the 15.4 million doses that were distributed, only 4.6 million people received their first vaccines on Monday night.
Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, wrote in the Washington Post that any delay in delivering the vaccine means that people could get sick or die, otherwise they would be protected. He blamed the federal government’s decision to simply supply vaccines to states, without providing the necessary resources to guarantee their distribution. This left “these relatively poorly funded agencies” that were “squeezed and stretched” in the previous nine months to once again discover some sort of solution for themselves.
It is no surprise, then, that the initial launch of the vaccine did not go as smoothly as planned in Florida or elsewhere in the U.S. Nor is it surprising that some Florida counties have used Eventbrite to schedule vaccinations. Even a hastily deployed third-party event platform with the potential for fraud and misuse is arguably better than nothing. But many would agree that it shouldn’t have come to that in the first place.