VaccineFinder.org is an ambitious but limited attempt to simplify Americans’ search for vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hoping to make it easier for Americans to find Covid-19 vaccines, is backing the test of a centralized online portal where the public can search for nearby vaccination locations with doses on hand.
The website, called VaccineFinder, is run by Boston Children’s Hospital with the help of several collaborators. It grew out of the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009 and has been used for years to coordinate the distribution of flu and childhood vaccines. It expanded on Wednesday to include the availability of coronavirus vaccines at more than 20,000 locations, concentrated in several states.
If the program goes well, the website’s developers plan to expand it nationwide in coming weeks to include nearly all vaccine providers that agree to be featured. That would make the website far more comprehensive than anything that exists now.
“We’re trying to create a trusted site and bring some order to all this chaos and confusion around availability,” said John Brownstein, a Boston Children’s Hospital researcher who runs VaccineFinder.org.
The project is not a panacea. It will not enable people to book appointments; it simply directs people to other portals where they can try to register to get vaccinated.
Nor does the website address the key constraints — most notably the limited supply of vaccine doses — that are preventing more people from quickly getting shots. And there is a risk that the addition of yet another vaccine website will only exacerbate the current confusion.
“It’s not a tool that’s going to necessarily make things easier for people to get the vaccine,” said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers. “They’re going to see where vaccine is, but they’re still going to have challenges trying to get an appointment.”
After a rocky start, the vaccination campaign in the United States has accelerated in recent weeks. Seventeen percent of adults have received a first dose, and 7.6 percent are fully vaccinated, according to the C.D.C. That puts the government well on the way to fulfilling President Biden’s promise that at least 100 million vaccine doses would be administered in the United States by his 100th day in office; he has since raised that target to 150 million doses.
Despite the progress, though, getting appointments for vaccinations has been a source of great frustration for many people. Appointment slots are filled within minutes of becoming available. States, local health departments and pharmacy chains have their own sign-up websites that in many cases do not share data with one another. The C.D.C. has its own vaccine administration management system, or VAMS, which some states are using to have people register for vaccinations and to collect essential data, but state officials have complained that it is clunky.
Exasperated people have taken matters into their own hands, creating online navigator tools and “vaccine hunter” Facebook groups in cities like Los Angeles and New Orleans to help connect people with available doses.
When the VaccineFinder portal goes live this week, it will include some drugstores and grocery stores nationwide, plus many other locations, like mass-vaccination sites, in Alaska, Indiana, Iowa and Tennessee.
Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency was encouraging vaccination locations to “provide accurate and up-to-date information on location, hours and availability of vaccines, so Americans can find vaccine sites easier.”
Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said, “I think people are optimistic and eagerly awaiting it.” He continued, “As with anything that we roll out in the middle of this pandemic, if there are glitches it could end up creating a lot of confusion, but I think we’ll just have to work through it.”
Finding doses was relatively straightforward in the first weeks of the vaccine rollout, when eligible people — health care workers and residents and staff at long-term care facilities — were getting vaccinated mainly where they lived or worked.
But states have since expanded their eligibility criteria to include older people, people with certain medical conditions and certain frontline workers. More locations have also been added to give out vaccines, including stadiums and local pharmacies.
The federal government did not create a centralized sign-up system for the vaccine rollout, and states have been slow to set up their own. In that void, counties, local health departments, pharmacy chains and other vaccine providers started their own appointment-booking websites, in some cases adapting systems they already had and in others buying new tools from vendors.
These systems are often not synchronized to share information like which people have registered on their websites. That has frustrated state and local health officials, who cannot cross off their lists people who have secured an appointment at a different location after registering on multiple systems.
“It’s harder to track vaccination appointments and offer them to people who need it most when the systems are so disjointed,” said Blaire Bryant, associate legislative director for health for the National Association of Counties.
Federal and state lawmakers have been clamoring for more centralized registration systems. Representative Anthony Brown, Democrat of Maryland, last week introduced legislation that would create a nationwide sign-up system where the public can register to get vaccinated.
More states have begun registration websites in recent weeks, but those systems typically don’t let people reserve a vaccine or an appointment directly. Instead, they help people navigate existing systems or sign up to get notified when they can schedule an appointment.
The VaccineFinder website is meant to complement, not replace, those efforts, said Dr. Brownstein, who is also the chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Google started the earliest version of what became the VaccineFinder website. In 2012 Dr. Brownstein and his team took it over. Since then they have been working with state and local officials to identify locations that offer routine vaccinations. The project has received federal funding of about $1 million annually to maintain the website, first from the Department of Health and Human Services and since 2017 directly from the C.D.C. The U.S. government has provided more than $8 million to help the website expand for Covid-19 vaccines.
The VaccineFinder allows people to enter their ZIP code, the distance they’re willing to travel and which of the authorized vaccines they are seeking.
That information generates a map dotted with nearby vaccination locations, with links to appointment-booking websites set up by states, local health departments and pharmacy chains. Vaccine providers can opt out of being highlighted on VaccineFinder. For example, a provider might opt out if it is only vaccinating a certain slice of the population like health care workers.
The website will show which places have doses available, based on data that vaccine locations are supposed to report daily. The need to report that information daily “could be a big lift and lead to varying degrees of accuracy in the system,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of City and County Health Officials. “As with anything, the value will be in the quality of the data provided,” she added.
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