Adventures in Vaccinating

Hae Ja Yoon and Kyung Hwa Seo, the author’s parents, at Rockefeller Center, Christmas 2019.

New York City’s system was no easier to navigate. For the life of me, I could not figure out why the official registries seemed to list non-overlapping vaccination sites. I finally realized it was because the official registries did, indeed, list non-overlapping vaccination sites. Some were operated by New York City, while others were operated by the state; neither list acknowledged the existence of the other. I imagine this reflects the animus between the mayor and the governor of New York, who also try to avoid acknowledging each other’s existence.

I started with the mom-and-pop pharmacies listed on one of the registries, but neither the moms nor the pops would pick up their phones. I moved on to a chain pharmacy with a downtown branch that was offering the vaccine. When I tried to access its website, however, I was redirected to an electronic antechamber, which cheerfully indicated a few hundred people were ahead of me in queue. Once in, the site warned, I would have 15 minutes to schedule an appointment before being kicked out, so someone else could take their turn.

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the state of New York was opening a mass vaccination center at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, I decided the new site probably gave me the best opportunity to snag an appointment before the rest of New York caught on. The night before the registration website was set to open, I again brought my computer to bed.

The next morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, I grabbed my laptop. The registration website was already live, and I started to make an appointment for my parents. As I was typing, I realized I had another problem: I could only register one parent at a time. Going to a mass vaccination site operated by the National Guard was daunting enough, but I really did not want my parents to have to make two separate trips.

To try to game the system, I picked an appointment toward the end of the day. It seemed like my fellow early risers were grabbing the first available appointments, so the later appointments remained untouched. By the time I had registered my father and re-entered the system to register my mother, many of those appointments had been claimed, as well. Fortunately, I was still able to get an appointment for my mother, 30 minutes after my father’s slot. Knowing how chaotic the vaccination center would be in the first few days, I knew that if my father showed up a little late for his appointment, and my mother showed up a little early for hers, no one would notice.

I was thrilled to get the appointments, but it was hard not to wonder: Is this really how the system is supposed to work?