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- Allocating excess doses has been a challenge in the deployment of the COVID-19 vaccine.
- Dr B, a sorted list of vaccines on hold, could help get those doses to high priority recipients.
- The team behind Dr B tries to reach vulnerable groups through community partnerships.
- Visit Insider’s Business section for more stories.
The COVID-19 vaccine is in high demand, with oversaturated registration sites and “vaccine hunters” keen to take a dose. This mad rush for vaccines sometimes results in remaining doses, as counterintuitive as that may sound.
Usually, it’s because someone has booked multiple vaccine appointments and hasn’t canceled the extras. At the end of the day, a vaccinator may find that there are doses left and be required to use them within six hours of thawing.
At the start of the rollout, those extras went to well-connected friends and family or “someone who buys chips in the drugstore,” Cyrus Massoumi, ZocDoc founder, told Insider. Massoumi estimated that 20-30% of vaccine doses were allocated this way – mostly by chance – and he said he was determined to create a more equitable solution.
Paging Dr. B, an online vaccine waiting list named after Massoumi’s grandfather, who affectionately called himself Dr. Bubba and was a doctor during the 1918 influenza pandemic. The website is a list of The wait sorted out to get the remaining vaccine doses to people in need.
Over half a million people have signed up for the Dr. B program. To join, you are asked to enter your name, zip code, phone number, and any information your local health department might collect to determine your priority status, such as your age, medical risk factors, and occupation.
When there is an extra dose of vaccine at a site near you, Dr B will text anyone high on the priority list in the area. The list is designed to catch those in the early stages of eligibility who have not yet been vaccinated – much like priority boarding at an airport, Massoumi said.
“If because of your priority you got that first class ticket and there’s a long line at United, you jump ahead,” Massoumi told Insider. “This is how our system works, and it is inherently fairer.”
Dr B quietly launched with targeted community outreach
If you missed the smooth launch of Dr B in January, it’s because the team was trying to give a helping hand to people in underserved communities.
“There is some benefit to signing up first,” Massoumi told Insider. “So as far as we can go to the communities that maybe have the greatest needs and make sure that we are particularly focused on them, that is very important to us.”
Black and Latin Americans are probably the most disadvantaged, as they are at a higher risk of severe COVID-19 and death, but have received fewer doses of the vaccine than their white counterparts.
Massoumi said within each priority level on the waiting list – among people with the same age, same zip code, same job and same health conditions – the extra doses come first, first served. Whoever gets on the list early has a head start.
This kind of approach could prioritize the most connected people, bioethicist Arthur Caplan previously told Insider. And the nature of Dr B means that the service is only available to people with a phone and the ability to register online.
Dr B said he was working with community networks, church leaders and other unofficial partners to ensure that those who need the most, not the most connections, are included in the earliest stages. waiting list steps. Now that the patient side has grown to reach over half a million people, the real work – coordinating with providers to dispense additional doses – has begun.
The team tries to reach high-risk groups
Dr B works with two vaccine suppliers: one in Little Rock, Arkansas, and another in Queens, New York. More than 200 additional sites are on the bridge to join the effort as the service evolves.
Massoumi told Insider that when he visited Dr B’s pilot site in Queens, he was surprised to see healthcare workers using the service to get leftover snapshots. Since states have opened up their deployments, one would assume that doctors and nurses had already been fully immunized.
But some healthcare workers who are not affiliated with a hospital were overlooked in the first step and still try to book appointments through an oversaturated system. Dr B says his prioritization ensures these people will be the first to benefit from the service.
Uché Blackstock, the founder of Advancing Health Equity, has been considering how to better reach communities of color since the first vaccine was cleared. She previously told Insider that reaching people vulnerable to COVID-19 due to racism can be difficult because states do not use race as an eligibility measure for vaccine rollouts.
Montana is the only state that explicitly prioritizes people getting vaccinated based on their race or ethnicity, and Dr. B doesn’t ask for people’s race unless the state does, a declared Massoumi. But by deploying the service in places that overlap with vulnerable groups, the service could reach those in need.
“I think you could maybe take a map at the zip code level and see, based on the most affected communities, which ones will need the resources the most,” Blackstock said.
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