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Want To Join A Vaccine Standby List? This National Signup Just Launched In Queens
By
Caroline Lewis
Published Mar 9, 2021
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Seth Wenig/AP/Shutterstock
By
Caroline Lewis
Published Mar 9, 2021
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Vaccine standby lists are something of an open secret. Most dose providers collect contact info from people who are able to show up on short notice if shots become available at the end of the day. But the lists are generally not advertised.
“When there are those excess doses, one of four things happens,” says Cyrus Massoumi, the founder and former CEO of ZocDoc, the popular website for scheduling doctors’ appointments. “Either they go to waste, or they go to someone who happens to be there—not necessarily the highest priority patient. Or they go to someone who’s a friend in the phonebook of the person giving the vaccine because, out of desperation, they’re just trying to make sure it doesn’t go to waste. Lastly, it may go to people who are able or have the resources to queue in line.”
That’s why Massoumi has taken it upon himself to streamline the standby process through a new website called Dr. B. The online database offers a centralized place for individuals to sign up for those leftover vaccines, regardless of where they live or their priority group. Participating vaccine hubs then indicate when they have doses and how many are available so that Dr. B can automatically text people in the area based on their eligibility criteria.
READ MORE: Skipping The Line: How Some NYers Get Vaccinated Without An Appointment
Massoumi’s team began developing the project in January. It is now open to individuals and is slowly building up its roster of providers. Even without widespread advertising, it has a waitlist of about 200 vaccine sites across the country that want to join. Last week, Dr. B got a small test run at a hub in Queens that administers between 500 and 1,000 shots per day. (Dr. B shared the site’s name with WNYC/Gothamist but said it could not be named publicly.)
“Anything that can help connect eligible individuals to doses is a wonderful thing,” said a spokesperson for the institution that operates the site.
At the Queens site in question, 10% to 12% of the people who have appointments don’t show up on a given day, the spokesperson said. He said that’s because someone has often been “appointment shopping,” meaning they made one booking, then found another that was earlier or more convenient somewhere else. Because the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have to be kept at cold temperatures and used within a certain amount of time after being thawed out, no-shows and cancellations can result in a scramble to find willing takers.
Even though New York state policy says vaccine sites are supposed to maintain standby lists of people who are eligible for the shots, WNYC/Gothamist has found that the sites sometimes bend the rules. Bioethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan says overlooking eligibility is not ideal, but OK to do if there is no other option and a dose might go to waste.
“At this point, it’s really prudent to make a waitlist of eligible people and a waitlist of just anybody who can show up fast and just run the list, making it clear you’re trying to get eligible people first,” said Caplan, who founded the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU School of Medicine.
READ MORE: Nearly Three Months Out, We Have A Clear Picture Of COVID-19 Vaccine Safety
Dr. B has another proposal for ensuring fairness and equity with standby lists. When people sign up, they enter personal information that the website can cross-reference with local eligibility criteria. When a dose becomes available, Dr. B alerts people in the area by priority group—meaning a senior citizen in phase 1a will always be notified first and so on down the line of eligibility. At the Queens hub where Dr. B conducted its field test last week, Massoumi says the first two people who came in via the website were health care workers who were not employed by hospitals, so they might not have had as easy access to the vaccine as some of their colleagues.
The third was an older woman who spoke Spanish and had difficulty signing up for a vaccine appointment when she first became eligible. Dr. B is currently available in English and Spanish. “Presumably, in her case, the existing systems were a bit more difficult to navigate, and Dr. B took her less than a minute to sign up,” Massoumi said.
He adds that, while the issues of eligibility and extra doses may not be as pressing in the U.S. as vaccine supply rapidly grows, he thinks Dr. B could be useful in other countries as they launch vaccine rollouts. Massoumi says his team—which includes operations experts who were pulled from President Biden’s transition team as that wound down—is working to ramp up their capacity as quickly as possible.
In the meantime, the Queens site where Dr. B was piloted and other vaccine hubs throughout the city continue to rely on regular standby lists—however imperfect they may be.
Tagged
COVID-19
coronavirus
vaccine
Caroline Lewis
Caroline Lewis is on the health care beat for WNYC and Gothamist. She has covered COVID, a nurses' strike, the overdose crisis and New York’s marijuana legalization effort, and spent a year investigating patients' medical bills. She always wants to hear about how everyday New Yorkers experience the health system. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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