N.Y.’S vaccine sites weren’t efficient, so he built one for $50

Huge Ma, a 31-year-old software engineer for Airbnb, was stunned when he tried to make a coronavirus vaccine appointment for his mother in early January and saw that there were dozens of websites to check, each with its own sign-up protocol.

“There has to be a better way,” he said he remembered thinking.

So, he developed one. In about two weeks. For less than $50.

The site compiles availability from the three main city and state of New York vaccine systems and sends the information in real time to Twitter.

“It’s sort of become a challenge to myself, to prove what one person with time and a little motivation can do,” he told The New York Times.

Supply shortages and problems with access to vaccination appointments have been some of the barriers to the equitable distribution of the vaccine in New York City and across the United States, officials have acknowledged.

So volunteers in New York and states including Texas, California and Massachusetts have tried to use their technological skills to simplify that process.

Jeremy Novich, 35, a clinical psychologist on the Upper West Side on Manhattan, started reaching out to seniors after realizing that his own older relatives could not have made appointments on their own.

“The system is set up to be a technology racebetween 25-year-olds and 85-year-olds,” he said. “That’s not a race, that’s elder neglect.”

With two friends, on Jan. 12 he launched the Vaccine Appointment Assistance Team, a person-to-person effort that began by helping older people from local synagogues and expanded to help those who sign up via a hotline or web form.

Because of high demand, the service — which now has 20 volunteer caseworkers — has stopped taking new cases for now, and the founders are thinking about partnering with a nonprofit to increase capacity.

The most ambitious online volunteer assistance effort in the city is NYC Vaccine List, a website that compiles appointments from more than 50 vaccination sites — city, state and private.

About 20 volunteers write code, reach out to organizations and call inoculation centers to post their availabilities. These sites, though, don’t solve all access problems. They still require computer literacy and benefit only those who know about them.

But by making the process more efficient, they’re easing the way for hundreds who were struggling to find a slot.

AP A health care worker (left) screens a person waiting in line at a COVID-19 vaccination site Feb. 10 at Citifield in Queens in New York.