Bots do work to book shots
Programmers help others land vaccine appointments during decentralized rollout
Matthew Tralka built his bot out of necessity.
His father, a Howard County teacher, worried about bringing the coronavirus home to Tralka’s mother, who has preexisting conditions that make infection riskier.
As the start of in-person learning approached, and Tralka’s father couldn’t find a vaccine, he resigned from his teaching job. But determined to get his parents vaccinated and help others avoid the decision his family had to make, Tralka started coding.
As access to COVID-19 vaccinations improves, there are still a number of amateur and professional programmers, like Tralka, who donate their time to streamlining Maryland’s tangle of vaccination sign-up sites with appointment-finding programs.
He managed to get his parents’ appointments, but not before his father resigned.
Since vaccines became available in December, Marylanders frustrated after repeatedly failing to secure a vaccine appointment have banded together to form do-it-yourself networks.
A popular Facebook group, Maryland Vaccine Hunters, pairs those who need the vaccine with those who have the time and skill to book the appointments.
But some, such as Tralka, take things a step further, using computer programming languages to communicate with various vaccine websites to find out when new vaccine appointments become available automatically.
A research assistant and student at the University of Maryland, Tralka spends his days figuring out how to make data more accessible.
“It poses a huge issue,” he said, criticizing the myriad websites that Maryland residents have navigated to find COVID-19 vaccines. “There are disabilities that prohibit people from typing very quickly. I wanted the program that I made to be something that people like that could use without refreshing 30 times and typing info in over and over and over again.”
Some bots trawl the sites for vaccine “drops” and alert the creator when a fresh slew of sign-ups appears. Others go a step further and arm the bots with individualized information, such as name, birth date and email address, to increase the chances of nabbing one of the coveted spots.
That the bots exist speaks to the decentralized and chaotic nature of the vaccine rollout, said Jen Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Information Studies.
Golbeck has a doctorate in computer science and studies the interactions between people and digital systems for a living. She too had difficulty securing a vaccine.
“It’s sort of like buying Ticketmaster tickets in the late ’90s,” Golbeck said. “But at least then you knew tickets went on sale at noon, and there was a waiting room, and you could grab them.”
When Maryland and its counties started vaccinating, residents could register on portals run by local health departments and hospitals and wait for an invitation to sign up for an appointment. But as operations expanded, the Maryland Health Department set up mass vaccination sites and began allocating vaccines to pharmacies throughout the state.
The number of websites proliferated.
Getting an appointment at CVS, which requires the user to have health insurance information on hand, is different from getting an appointment at Walgreens, which requires the user to create an account on the website. Giant, Rite Aid and Safeway all have their own websites as well.
The state itself created a number of sites meant to help residents find appointments, including massvax. maryland.gov, which previously posted appointments as they became available. It has since been used mainly to post appointments resulting from cancellations and no-shows, state spokesperson Michael Ricci said.
Maryland in recent weeks has launched a new registration portal, onestop.md.gov/ preregistration, that as the name suggests, is a one-stop way to access appointments for all the state’s mass vaccination sites.
And while programmers said the technology exists to monetize the kind of bots they’ve written, the state hasn’t seen any misuse or misappropriation of vaccine appointments, said Stephen Kolbe, the state’s chief technology officer.
The single registration site is meant to prevent residents from having to log on at the precise moment new appointments come online or spend the day refreshing.
Still, the plethora of pharmacy websites have kept altruistic coders busy trying to score appointments for their extended network of friends and family members.
They likened the process of waiting for appointments to appear and hustling to enter information faster than others doing the same thing to buying limited-edition sneakers or highly sought gaming consoles that are sold out in seconds.
“It’s almost like Hunger Games,” said Michael Jester, a coder from Accokeek.
Jester has signed up about 100 people for vaccines, he said, using scripts he wrote to monitor the previous state mass vaccination site as well as websites for Sam’s Club, Rite Aid and Martin’s Supermarkets.
Jester waits for the bots to tell him an appointment has opened, then copy and pastes information from people who have asked for his assistance.
“People shouldn’t have to refresh these pages just so they know they can survive the pandemic,” said Mat Steininger, computer science student at University of Maryland
His programs are perhaps the most well-known and far-reaching. He runs the Twitter account @MDVaxAlerts, which has more than 15,000 followers, and the corresponding website mdvax.info. Both automatically update and send out alerts when various vaccine providers add new appointment slots.
Steininger started a subscription service after high school that notified subscribers when online stores restocked with limited edition clothing or sneakers. His skills translated well to the vaccine distribution environment, he said, to his dismay.
“It’s pretty shameful in that regard,” he said.
He has about 13 programs running, Steininger said, which all feed updates to the Twitter account and website. It’s not a perfect system. Sometimes the websites change their structure, requiring fixes on his end. Sometimes the bots send out alerts even when no appointments are available.
“It’s a bit of cat and mouse,” he said. “They change, I fix.”
In February, 21 county executives, along with Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott, asked the state health department to create one website for not only the state-run mass vaccination sites but also all vaccine providers. Gov. Larry Hogan, at a February news conference, pushed back on the request.
“We don’t want one point of failure,” Hogan said. “We don’t want millions of people to go into one website and crash it. The system is working better.”
Golbeck isn’t so sure. There are commercial systems built for handling this kind of traffic, she said, and customer information is likely more vulnerable when several different companies retain it rather than one government steward. Creating one website for multiple providers wouldn’t be impossible, Golbeck said. States regularly create one website to handle complicated government services, such as unemployment insurance or Medicaid.
It’s been done for COVID19 vaccines elsewhere. The Washington, D.C., city government, after a rocky vaccine rollout of its own, set up a preregistration system that connects residents and workers with multiple different providers.
But unlike Washington, Maryland is a state with different municipal governments, and a larger web of private partners spread out across a bigger geographic area.
“The main question from a technical standpoint is how much access the state has to info about the pharmacy’s vaccine access,” Golbeck said, “because all the pharmacies have their own systems.”
Because multiple different organizations give out coronavirus vaccines, the private pharmacies would have to allow the Maryland government to access their sites, and programmers with the state information technology department would then have to create individualized code for each one.
The department, instead, has been focused on getting the registration website for the state’s mass vaccination locations up and running, Kolbe said.
“I do applaud the entrepreneurial spirit” of the volunteer programmers, he said, but advised residents looking for vaccines to go through official channels to get vaccine appointments to avoid having their information stolen.
To sign up for an appointment at a mass vaccination site, go to onestop.md.gov/ preregistration.