- Allocation of excess doses was a challenge in the deployment of the COVID-19 vaccine.
- Dr. B, a three-part vaccination assistance list, can help get the doses from high-priority recipients.
- The team behind dr. B is reaching vulnerable groups through community partnerships.
- Visit the Insider Business Department for more stories.
The COVID-19 vaccine is in high demand, with oversaturated reporting sites and “vaccine hunters” eager to get a dose. This crazy vaccine sometimes leads to residual doses, however counter-intuitive it may seem.
Usually it is because someone has booked several vaccination appointments and does not cancel the extras. At the end of the day, a vaccine provider may realize that there are doses left over and be forced to use them within six hours of thawing.
Early in the rollout, these extras went to well-connected friends and family members or ‘someone who buys potato chips at the pharmacy’, Cyrus Massoumi, the founder of ZocDoc, told Insider. Massoumi estimated that 20% to 30% of the vaccine doses were administered in this way – essentially by chance – and he said he was determined to create a fairer solution.
Paging Dr. B, an online vaccination list for vaccines named after Massoumi’s grandfather, who lovingly Dr. Bubba was named and was a physician during the flu pandemic in 1918. The website is a driven waiting list to get remaining vaccine doses to people in need.
More than half a million people visited Dr. B. joined. To join, you will be asked to enter your name, zip code, telephone number and any information your local health department may collect to determine your priority status, such as your age, medical risk factors and occupation.
If there is an extra dose of vaccine in a place near you, dr. B Send an SMS to those who are at the top of the priority list in the area. The list is designed to catch people in early fitness stages who have not yet been vaccinated – just like going to an airport, Massoumi said.
“If you have the first-class ticket because of your priority and there is a long queue at United, you jump ahead,” Massoumi told Insider. “That’s how our system works, and it’s inherently fairer.”
Dr. B quietly started a targeted community outreach
If you like the gentle introduction of Dr. B missed in January, it’s because the team tried to help people in underserved communities.
“There’s some benefit to signing up first,” Massoumi told Insider. “So, to the extent that we can go to the communities that have perhaps the greatest need and make sure we focus on that in particular, it’s very important to us.”
Black and Latinx Americans are probably most in need, as they are at higher risk for severe COVID-19 and death, but have received fewer doses than their white counterparts.
Massoumi said that within each priority level of the assistance list – among people of the same age, postcode, job and health conditions – extra doses are first-and-first earnings. Whoever comes early on the list has an advantage.
This kind of approach can lead to the best connected people taking precedence, bioethicist Arthur Caplan told Insider earlier. The nature of Dr. B means that the service is only available to people with telephones and the ability to log in online.
Dr. B said it works with community networks, church leaders and other unofficial partners to make sure people with the most needs, not the most commitments, are included in the early stages of the assistance list. Now that the patient’s side has reached more than half a million people, the real work – coordinated with the providers to distribute extra doses – has begun.
The team tries to reach high-risk groups
Dr. B works with two vaccine providers: one in Little Rock, Arkansas, and one in Queens, New York. More than 200 additional sites are on deck to deal with the upscaling of the service.
Massoumi told Insider he was surprised to see health workers using the service to get leftover shots when he saw Dr. Since states have opened their entry into force, one can assume that doctors and nurses have already been fully vaccinated.
But some health workers who are not affiliated with a hospital have been overlooked in the first phase and are still trying to book appointments through an oversaturated system. Dr. B says that prioritizing it ensures that the people benefit first from the service.
Uché Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, has been thinking about how to better reach color communities since the first vaccine was approved. She earlier told Insider that it can be difficult to reach people who are vulnerable to COVID-19 because of racism because states do not use race as a measure of vaccination.
Montana is the only state that explicitly prioritizes people to be vaccinated based on their race or ethnicity, and dr. B does not ask for people’s race unless the state does, Massoumi said. But by implementing the service in places that overlap with vulnerable groups, the service can reach those in need.
“I think you might be able to take a map on zip code and see, based on the communities that are most affected, these are the communities that are going to need the most resources,” Blackstock said.