regs to riches

Share this post
💉 vaccine hunting
www.regs2riches.com

💉 vaccine hunting

what to put in our crosshairs

Vass Bednar
May 2, 2021
11
5
Share this post
💉 vaccine hunting
www.regs2riches.com

We are Building a Digital Ontario - unless it’s the roll out of life-saving vaccines in a global pandemic. That we are leaving up to volunteers.

🥂 But maybe it’s time to put the volunteer (read: corporate shadow tech) champagne back on ice. Maybe they can’t solve all our problems in 3 hours. Maybe they create new ones. 🍾

Twitter avatar for @JohnTory
John Tory @JohnTory
The City is partnering with @VaxHuntersCan to help Torontonians identify available next-day appointments at City-run clinics. The vaccine rollout is an all hands-on deck effort. Thankful that Vaccine Hunters Canada is working with us to get people get vaccinated. #TeamToronto
Image
12:02 PM ∙ Apr 28, 2021
338Likes67Retweets

Twitter avatar for @EVYSTADIUM
Evy Kwong @EVYSTADIUM
finding a vaccine in ontario:
Twitter avatar for @jarule
Ja Rule @jarule
I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked, lead astray!!!
1:58 PM ∙ Apr 28, 2021
205Likes31Retweets

Twitter avatar for @emilydawnlove
Emily @emilydawnlove
Lol at all these Toronto politicians pretending a partnership with Vaccine Hunters is a feel-good story rather than a colossal embarrassment and indictment of their own pathetic failure to serve the people of this city
12:37 PM ∙ Apr 28, 2021
687Likes137Retweets

Twitter avatar for @KindaHagi
Sarah Hagi @KindaHagi
Wakin up to hear the news that the government is partnering with a Twitter account called Vaccine Hunters and not paying them but just expecting them to help mitigate a health crisis, this rules
12:37 PM ∙ Apr 28, 2021
875Likes101Retweets

Twitter avatar for @healeytypes
Michael Healey @healeytypes
Vaccine Hunters Canada, to the city of Toronto
Bruce Willis Party GIF by IFC
12:27 PM ∙ Apr 28, 2021
43Likes4Retweets

💸 I think everyone on Twitter would be even *more* annoyed if they knew that a few days after the City of Toronto awarded a $1.4M contract to a marketing company to execute the “Ward Immunization Campaign.” Because guess what? It’s worth investing in the vaccine roll out.

Share

Twitter avatar for @ae_clarke
Amanda Clarke @ae_clarke
Happy these people are getting recognition, and I hope this meeting includes a serious conversation about the investment (talent, $, policy) we need to build government's capacity to provide essential services in lieu of it falling to volunteers.
Twitter avatar for @VaxHuntersCan
Vaccine Hunters Canada @VaxHuntersCan
Pinch us, eh?! We can't believe in two months we've grown from a few keeners on Discord to a nationwide movement. Canada, help us share OUR story tomorrow! 🇨🇦#VHCSuccess https://t.co/duJiIaN6ef
1:13 PM ∙ May 18, 2021
6Likes1Retweet
Twitter avatar for @dk_munro
Daniel Munro @dk_munro
Still dumbstruck that Canada’s most prominent pandemic innovation success is a handful of (great) volunteers who tweet vaccine info because governments couldn’t develop a simple booking and distribution process.
12:38 PM ∙ May 18, 2021
2,394Likes289Retweets

The volunteer-run Vaccine Hunters Canada perfectly captures the tension between grassroots organizations filling a gap and the government investing in public health products. Their halo hones in on the frustration that many in Ontario have been expressing - that so many are reliant on a Twitter account to get intel on vaccination opportunities. An online mutual aid group that is also deserving of the Order of Canada (*all 42k+ members on the Discord Channel!). 🇨🇦

Twitter avatar for @gabigale_
Gabigale @gabigale_
Soooo... which one of us is nominating @VaxHuntersCan for the Order of Canada for 4unning our vaccine program??
8:40 PM ∙ Apr 23, 2021
1,083Likes57Retweets

Twitter avatar for @arc3
carol arcus @arc3
Jesse finds 'vaccine hunting groups' on the Internet. Why must mutual aid be underground, rather than a part of our health system? @A_M_L_ #medialiteracy @jessehirsh
bit.lyVaccine HuntingWhen you gotta do whatever it takes to survive
12:59 PM ∙ Apr 8, 2021
2Likes3Retweets

The tool is a lot like those accounts that help you sniff out a PS5 drop: they don’t highlight that Sony is doing a terrible job distributing product, they highlight the scarcity of the product and then crowdsource the treasure hunt. It becomes a matter of what groups have the attention and resources to go out and get it.

☝️ Why didn’t the [provincial] government build something?

I think the answer is really complicated. It has to do with procurement, politics, and money. We should not assume that our civil service doesn’t have the capacity to build something meaningful - it does. We should ask why our political class did not prioritize facilitating a responsible roll out. Perhaps the customer acquisition opportunity and private interests won. Shopper’s Drug Mart just isn’t accountable to the public the way that the government is. *My kingdom for an FOI of that decision memo.

Twitter avatar for @sknitting26
sasha @sknitting26
So @ShopprsDrugMart online booking system doesn’t work, yet they continue to direct patients to it, having them sign up for a waitlist that is a black hole and doesn’t lead to a booking link when stores have shots. https://t.co/fO12pHU8fq
Twitter avatar for @PharmacistMama
Kristen Watt - Pharmacist Mama - she/her #BLM @PharmacistMama
@sknitting26 @ShopprsDrugMart I’ve confirmed with an Associate friend. It does not work. Across the board. So we have pharmacies with 1300 doses and no way to contact people
4:02 PM ∙ Apr 26, 2021
30Likes12Retweets

Twitter avatar for @ldobsonhughes
Lauren Dobson-Hughes @ldobsonhughes
It is not that Ford and Hillier didn't realize they could create a simple postcode vaccine look-up and these genius tech guys somehow did. It's that Ford and Hillier specifically chose not to have the govt take a role in centralized, coordinated vaccine access
12:47 PM ∙ May 1, 2021
1,976Likes538Retweets

☝️ Is the province even equipped to build something meaningful?

You tell me: we’ve got 34 PHUs in Ontario that have been empowered to pursue their own booking approaches (call centres and websites) further fragmenting the space.

Then within, hospital networks operate like corporate/public health fiefdoms.

We still don’t have an integrated electronic medical record in Ontario after 25 years of trying. Those same challenges (mostly related to interoperability standards) underpin an integrated approach to vaccine booking.

*I’m not trying to suggest that because Ontario is uniquely complex, building a cool centralized tool is less possible - this is not an excuse, just context.

Now, how did Nova Scotia compel pharmacies to use their centralized booking system and Ontario didn’t? Unclear but I would love to read about that in Maclean’s or something. Like, did CANImmunize just do an awesome job negotiating? Is it true that they gave pharmacies iPads with their software pre-loaded? 🤷‍♀️

☝️ Are the Vaccine Hunters “better than nothing”?

For many, our bar (and mood?) is so low right now that we’re ready to rationalize that at this point, we just need to get vaccines in arms. While that’s true, it’s ALSO okay to be agitated by all the leap-frogging going on. Essential workers remain unvaccinated while the WFH crew has the freedom and mobility to scour the province for a shot.

There’s a ton of inequity with the pop-ups too - with long lineups in hotspot communities. While VaxHunters can certainly claim some credit for driving demand to these pop ups, it’s also worth giving credit to community centres for doing the on-the-ground work to being vaccines to communities where essential workers live. Air war, meet ground game.

*I can’t wait to see that data contrasting the postal codes people live in versus where they were vaccinated. It’s going to be devastating.

☝️ Who is this hurting?

Perhaps some independent pharmacies that have people screaming at them on the phone re: vaccine availability. People that don’t speak English as their first language, or with low digital literacy, or without a Twitter account, or without a personal vehicle to travel to an appointment, or without the luxury of paid time off or flexible work, etc.

💰 Another question is: who owns the vaccine allocation data?

It seems as though the vast majority of people are manually checking the websites for appointments. People building tools to check and automatically notify people for appointments is a very small subset of the volunteers.

Of interest: Shopper's Drug Mart and Wal Mart offers appointments and it appears that it is possible to build tools to automatically check on them. It does not seem that these large companies have open APIs that could allow civic tech innovators to leverage open data in building more or similar tools. This means that the firms COULD sue or do something scary like get a cease or desist if they claim that their API is proprietary - even though it’s a legitimate part of the public health system.

APIs could allow a small subset of especially tech-savvy volunteers to leverage this to build tools. This is common in open data but it's not clear if one can just use this data. VaxHunters has taken an official stance that they don't want to scrape these sites for reasons. Based on my read of the below Discord post, it seems like the Vaccine Hunters are worried about legal action. 😇

I admire that the Vaccine Hunters are so committed to not having any vaccines go to waste. As we look ahead to more supply, there will be less scarcity.

There are a ton of issues related to relying on a volunteer group for vaccine information that are worthy of our sustained interrogation. Government-run civic tech assumes responsibility for language translation, maintenance, scalability, geographic coverage, and consistency - and more.

We should definitely be mad that the Twitter account is the “best we have.” This dystopian game of Pokemon Go ~approach, this hideous Easter Egg hunt for your health is a bad knock off of Amazing Race. While the urge for product designers and builders to offer solutions is admirable and comforting, it glosses over what our expectations of the state should be when it comes to providing systems like this - if not building it in-house, then putting out a competitive tender. While the province of Ontario did not, the City of Toronto did invest in marketing support (an outreach campaign).

Twitter avatar for @KamilKaramali
Kamil Karamali @KamilKaramali
2/7 Earlier, I RT'd @JProskowGlobal, who highlighted a vaccine-clinic search tool only available in the US.  The concept is simple: you text your postal code to a number and it replies with vaccine clinics nearby. Yet, Canada doesn't have this tool.
Twitter avatar for @JProskowGlobal
Jackson Proskow @JProskowGlobal
The US just launched a tool where you can text your zip code to a centralized number (“getvax”) and you’ll get an instant reply with nearby vaccination sites. https://t.co/iLUuuAv8Ng
1:18 AM ∙ May 1, 2021
183Likes31Retweets

The other evening during my nightly doom-scroll, I came across the above texting tool. I wonder if maybe building isn’t the “hard” part - maintenance and scalability of infrastructure, and translation into a range of languages - who is going to do that? How much is it worth?

Twitter avatar for @mckinneyjames
James McKinney @mckinneyjames
@elliemarshall @VassB To read eligibility reqs and book an appt you still need to visit covid-19.ontario.ca/vaccine-locati… (which also has postal code lookup), using a web-enabled device. I’m not sure what a (non-discoverable btw) SMS number is achieving...
covid-19.ontario.caCOVID-19 pharmacy vaccine locationsFind your closest pharmacy to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
2:22 PM ∙ May 2, 2021

Presenting a product as “easy” avoids tough policy questions about who *should* build this.

🧵 The thread below from Dan Hon discusses the issues with volunteer vaccination websites really well.

Twitter avatar for @hondanhon
Dan Hon @hondanhon
I see we're talking about volunteer vaccination websites again, thanks to this (imho) irresponsible NYT article about "building a new [vaccination website] for $50". Some observations and references:
nytimes.comN.Y.’s Vaccine Websites Weren’t Working. He Built a New One for $50.New Yorkers with tech skills were appalled when they tried to make vaccine appointments for older relatives. They knew there was a better way.
7:39 PM ∙ Feb 10, 2021
1,592Likes716Retweets

Twitter avatar for @hondanhon
Dan Hon @hondanhon
3/ By implying that a "better" vaccine website can be delivered for $50, the NYT is contributing to the false belief that government services don't have to be funded to be delivered well, and to unrealistic expectation about how much good government costs.
7:43 PM ∙ Feb 10, 2021
1,117Likes164Retweets

Leave a comment

As we continue the “hunt,” for answers and accountability, let’s not lose sight of the province - especially in light of big new digital plans.

Vass Bednar is the Executive Director of McMaster University’s new Master of Public Policy in Digital Society Program.

5
Share this post
💉 vaccine hunting
www.regs2riches.com
Previous
Next
5 Comments
Jesse Hirsh
May 2, 2021Liked by Vass Bednar

Excellent analysis. Reminds me of the adage that politics abhors a vacuum. In this case the overwhelming desire of some people to get the shot means the system will be gamed, or if there is no system, there is just the game?

Expand full comment
ReplyCollapse
1 reply by Vass Bednar
sean minogue
Writes How to Save the World + Make it…
May 2, 2021Liked by Vass Bednar

Such a great newsletter. Thanks for this.

Expand full comment
ReplyCollapse
3 more comments…
TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Vass Bednar
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing