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Amid a disorganized, decentralized and disappointing deployment of the coronavirus vaccine in the United States, some states and counties are turning to unlikely tools to distribute the assigned vaccines to as many people as possible. In many counties in Florida, for example, Eventbrite has become the only way to sign up for the vaccine.
As it has done with just about every aspect of this pandemic, the federal government largely leaves it up to the states to determine how to distribute the vaccines. Each state has had to develop its own protocol and its own list of priorities. And despite months to prepare for this colossal endeavor, many health departments still scrambled to find some sort of system – seemingly at the last minute – to ensure that people eligible for vaccines can make appointments. to get them. .
Unlike many states that only give vaccines to people who work in high-risk occupations, Florida allows anyone aged 65 and over to get vaccinated, due to a last-minute executive order from the Governor Ron DeSantis, who left the actual logistics. to distribute these vaccines to counties and local health systems.
“These guys are much more skilled at delivering health care services than a state government could ever be,” DeSantis told a CNN reporter on Monday.
With millions of beneficiaries suddenly eligible and no statewide distribution plan, Florida County Health Departments had to find a way to get as many people enrolled as quickly as possible. Enter Eventbrite.
Brevard County in Florida planned to use phone lines for appointments, but the phone system was not working, according to The Verge. The “only option,” the county told The Verge, was Eventbrite, a site best known for offering tickets to shows and concerts. Several other counties in Florida, including Manatee, Nassau, Collier, Sarasota, Flagler, and Pasco, have decided to do the same.
While quickly distributing vaccines to those on the priority list is certainly a good thing, there are issues here. Fake Eventbrite sites who accuse people of making nonexistent appointments have apparently cropped up. And relying solely on Eventbrite means that people who don’t have internet access or know how to use it won’t be able to sign up for the shot.
Then again, other counties in Florida simply decided to distribute vaccines on a first come, first serve basis, which led to stories of seniors camping out overnight in lines of hours to get vaccinated. . Hillsborough and Pinellas counties rolled out their own vaccine registration websites on Monday, which quickly collapsed with their phone scheduling services. Compared to these options, Eventbrite might not look so bad.
The Florida Department of Health did not respond to Recode’s request for comment on whether it recommends counties rely on Eventbrite for vaccine registrations. Eventbrite has not responded to questions about this new use of its platform or how it will handle personal health data provided by people who sign up for vaccines on its service.
Florida is not alone in its approach. Other health services and facilities across the country have also turned to tech companies to help with vaccine distribution. The Louisiana Department of Public Health offers a list of pharmacies with Covid-19 vaccines available in a document on its website that simply links to the Facebook pages of certain pharmacies. The New Jersey Ocean Health Initiatives (OHI) has started creating Facebook events to advertise its vaccine distribution events, although eligible recipients must register on the OHI website (not Facebook). California’s Stanford Medicine has created an algorithm to determine which of its workers should receive the vaccine first, only so that most of its residents and fellows are excluded from the list while administrators and people who work from home have a place on it. And the New York State ParCare Community Health Network has asked patients to sign up for vaccine locations through a Google Form (ParCare is currently under investigation for vaccine fraud, but this no is not related to its use of Google Forms).
The vaccine distribution situation reflects other occasions during the pandemic where technology companies have been called upon to do work that could have been done by public health systems. The US Department of Health and Human Services hired Palantir to create a brand new health data tracking system and TeleTracking, a software company, to make it work. Meanwhile, many states have used the exposure notification tool from Apple and Google to power digital contact tracing apps. The federal government refused to use the tool for national application.
With this patchwork of vaccine distribution policies and practices, immunization rates have varied wildly across the country, and no state has done it particularly well. The federal government had hoped to deliver the first dose of the vaccine to 20 million people by the end of 2020 – a target it was not close to achieving. The Washington Post reports that of the 15.4 million doses that were distributed, only 4.6 million people had received their first vaccines as of Monday evening.
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, wrote in the Washington Post that any delay in vaccine delivery meant people could get sick or die who otherwise would have been protected. He blamed the federal government’s decision to simply provide vaccines to states without providing the resources to distribute them. This left “those relatively poorly funded agencies” that were already “squeezed and stretched” over the previous nine months to once again find some sort of solution on their own.
It’s no surprise, then, that the initial vaccine rollout did not go as well as expected in Florida or elsewhere in the United States. It’s also not surprising that some counties in Florida 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 none at all. But many would agree that it shouldn’t have come to this in the first place.
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