Amid a disorganized, decentralized, and disappointing vaccination of coronavirus vaccines in the United States, some states and provinces are using improbable tools to get their approved vaccines to as many people as possible. In many Florida counties, for example, Eventbrite has become the only way to sign up for the vaccine.
As with virtually every aspect of this pandemic, the federal government leaves it largely up to individual states to figure out how to distribute vaccines. Each state had to come up with its own protocol and priority list. And although they had months to prepare for the huge undertaking, many health departments were still struggling to come up with some sort of system – apparently at the last minute – to make sure that people eligible for the vaccines , can make appointments to get it. .
Unlike many states that only give vaccines to people working in high-risk occupations, Florida can get a vaccine for anyone 65 years and older as a result of an executive order from Governor Ron DeSantis, who has left the actual logistics. the distribution of the vaccines to provinces and local health systems.
“These guys are far more capable of providing health care services than a state government could ever be,” DeSantis told a CNN reporter on Monday.
With millions of recipients suddenly eligible and no distribution plan across the country, provincial health departments in Florida had to find a way to report as many people as quickly as possible. Enter Eventbrite.
Brevard County in Florida has planned to use phone lines for appointments, but the phone system is not working, according to The Verge. The ‘only option’, the county told The Verge, was Eventbrite, a website that is particularly known for offering tickets for shows and concerts. Several other counties in Florida, including Manatee, Nassau, Collier, Sarasota, Flagler and Pasco, have decided to do the same.
While it’s a good thing to quickly distribute vaccines to people on the priority list, there are a few issues here. Fake sites for Eventbrite instructing people to make non-existent appointments has apparently surfaced. And relying solely on Eventbrite means that people who do not have access to or know how to use the internet cannot sign up to be vaccinated.
Then other Florida counties simply decided to release vaccines on a first-come, first-served basis, leading to stories of elderly people camping out in hour-long camps overnight to get their shots fired. Hillsborough and Pinellas counties set up their own vaccination registration sites on Monday, which immediately crashed along with their telephone service plans. Compared to the options, Eventbrite may not look so bad.
The Florida Department of Health did not respond to Recode’s request for comment or recommend that counties rely on Eventbrite for vaccine entries. Eventbrite has not responded to questions about this new use of its platform or how it will handle personal health data provided by people signing up for vaccinations for its service.
Florida is not alone in its approach. Other health departments and facilities across the country have also turned to technology companies to distribute their vaccine. Louisiana’s Department of Public Health presents a list of pharmacies with available Covid-19 vaccines in a document on its website that merely refers to a few pharmacies’ Facebook pages. The Ocean Health Initiatives (OHI) of New Jersey have led to the creation of Facebook opportunities to advertise their vaccines for the distribution of vaccines, although suitable recipients must register on the OHI website (not on Facebook). The Stanford Medicine of California has developed an algorithm to determine which of its workers should get the vaccine first, just for most residents and fellow human beings to stay off the list, while administrators and people who work from home, get a place on it. And the ParCare Community Health Network in New York State has patients enrolled through a Google form for vaccination slots (ParCare is currently being investigated for vaccine fraud, but it is not related to the use of Google forms).
The situation for the distribution of vaccines reflects other opportunities during the pandemic in which technological enterprises were employed to do the work that could be done by public health systems. The US Department of Health and Human Services has appointed Palantir to create a brand new system for tracking health data and TeleTracking, a software company, to manage it. Meanwhile, many states have used Apple’s and Google’s exposure notification tool to power digital contact tracking applications. The federal government did not want to use the tool for a nationwide app.
With this patch of vaccine distribution policies and practices, vaccination rates across the country have fluctuated, and no state has done particularly well. The federal government hoped to administer the first dose of vaccine to 20 million people by the end of 2020 – a goal it did not achieve near the meeting. The Washington Post reports that of the 15.4 million doses distributed, only 4.6 million people received their first vaccination shots as of Monday night.
Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, wrote in the Washington Post that any delays in the distribution of vaccines mean people could get sick or die who would otherwise be protected. He blamed the federal government’s decision to simply deliver vaccines to the states without providing the necessary resources to ensure their distribution. This has left ‘these relatively poorly funded agencies’ that have been ‘beaten and strained’ for the past nine months to come up with a solution for themselves again.
It is therefore no surprise that the initial vaccination of vaccine does not proceed as smoothly as planned in Florida or elsewhere in the USA. It is also no surprise that some counties in Florida use Eventbrite to plan vaccinations. Even a fast-paced third-party platform with fraud and abuse is probably better than nothing. But many agree that it should not have come to this in the first place.