Patrick McKenzie

So what was VaccinateCA?

In early 2021, we were quite concerned that people were making 20, 40, 60 phone calls to try to find a pharmacy that actually had a dose of the COVID vaccine in stock and could successfully deliver it to them.

I tweeted out randomly, you know, it's insane that every person or every caregiver is attempting to contact every medical provider in the state of California to find doses of the vaccine.

California clearly has at least one person capable of building a website where we can centralize that information and send everybody to the website.

If you build that website, I'll pay for the server bill or whatever.

And Carl Yang took up the gauntlet and invited 10 of his best friends and said, basically, all right, get in, guys, we're going to open source the availability of the vaccine in California by tomorrow morning.

Is that like 10 p.m.

at night, California time?

And so I looked down into the discord where, of course, all medical infrastructure is built and gave a few pointers on, you know, making scaled calling operations.

And then one thing led to another and ended up becoming the CEO of this initiative.

At the start, it was just like this hackathon project of a bunch of random tech people who thought, hey, we can build a website, make some phone calls, maybe help some people find the vaccine at the margin.

And it grew a little bit from there.

We ended up becoming essentially the public-private partnership, which was the clearinghouse for vaccine location information for the United States of America.

That felt a little weird at the time and continues to.

Oh, there are so many reasons and a whole lot of finger pointing going on.

One of the things was that there were almost no actors anywhere in the system who said, yes, this is definitely my responsibility.

Various parts of our nation's institutions, county level, public health departments, governor's offices, the presidency, two presidencies over this interval, which will become relevant.

They all said, well, I have a narrow part to play in this, but someone else has to do the hard yards of actually putting shots in people's arms.

And someone else is clearly dealing with the logistics problem, right?

And the ball was just dropped comprehensively.