How bots like 'TurboVax' boosted states in the rush to vaccinate America

• Twitter accounts sharing vaccination appointments have popped up across the US.
• The accounts are bots run by software engineers who helped Americans find appointments.
• Bots like TurboVax in New York City have courted thousands of followers.

Kenneth Hsu's parents-in-law were desperate to find a vaccine appointment.

In February, both over the age of 70, the two met the requirements to get vaccinated in their home state New Jersey. They added their names to the state's waiting list. Then silence followed.

"They were getting nowhere," said Hsu, a 40-year-old software architect from Basking Ridge, New Jersey, a city about 50 miles north of Trenton.

Since he wasn't yet eligible to receive a vaccine, Hsu said he hadn't known just how hard it was for those who were to get an appointment.

He found Twitter accounts of real people finding and sharing new appointments and found Facebook groups of people sharing when and how they secured an appointment.

"But after a couple of days getting into it, I just realized that there's got to be a better way," he said.

So, he put his skills to work over a few weeks in early February and created a program that scrubbed various county and pharmacy websites to see when new vaccination appointments became available.

In the early days of the vaccine rollout, appointments often disappeared within minutes, he said.

But days after setting up the bot, Hsu had scored his mother and father-in-law appointments to get vaccinated.

"I realized that this is a tool, this is an effective tool that could be used by others as well," Hsu said. "So I packaged it together and started tweeting that information."

Hsu told Insider that pharmacies like Rite Aid and CVS said they weren't interested in working with him, but they didn't stop him either.

Neither pharmacy returned Insider's request for comment.

Hsu worked with New Jersey officials on its vaccine finder tool

Hsu, however, did collaborate with the New Jersey Office of Innovation to help it develop its vaccine finder tool, which is still in beta but allows New Jersey residents to sort through available appointments in the state. Some of the data used comes from Hsu's bot, and he maintains a list of appointments on his website.

Since Hsu's created the tool in February, more than 89,000 people have followed the account, which tweets updates several times an hour, alerting followers to which vaccines have become available, their location, and how many appointments remain, when applicable. Just after 1 p.m. last Tuesday, the bot shared that a mass vaccination site in Atlantic County added more than 12,200 Pfizer appointments.

While Hsu said he doesn't closely monitor the number of followers he's gained, he's had to adjust his bot to prevent it from sharing a very limited number of appointments at a particular location because it wouldn't be useful for the tens of thousands of people monitoring the account.

At the beginning of the year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered vaccination guidelines to states that gave a rough order of who should be first in line to receive one of the shots authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use last year.

But the rollout was left up to states to execute, leading to problems, especially early on. In Florida, for example, long lines formed outside hospitals, and some counties used the event managing platform Eventbrite for registrations, posing challenges to residents who weren't tech-savvy.

At the outset, Mississippi stopped taking requests for appointments the same day it began, and phone lines quickly became in Georgia, the Associated Press reported. Many of these problems drew criticism, though many of the kinks have become less prevalent as vaccine appointments become more available as vaccinations speed up.

"I feel like the overall state, and really the US government in general, were a little bit behind in terms of just understanding and utilizing technology," Hsu said.

"There's a lot of missed opportunities here," he added. "But then again, you know, this is one of those once in a - hopefully - once in a lifetime type of situations. Hopefully, there are lessons learned and best practices that are being developed from this, that if we do come across something like this, it won't happen again."

At the beginning of March in Kansas City, Missouri, 27-year-old Peter Carnesciali wondered how he could simplify the process of finding a vaccination appointment when it became eligible to receive a jab under the state's guidelines.

Like Hsu, Carnesciali, a software engineer, decided to create a bot to scrub for open appointments at pharmacies. At first, he set the bot up to text him when an appointment became available. Soon, his friends wanted in; and eventually, he recognized there was a larger need in the city to find appointments.

In March, he created the @kcvaccinewatch bot, which has so far gained more than 26,000 followers. The bot monitors local pharmacies in Kansas City for new vaccine appointment drops. Creating the bot took about a week of "intense" work, Carnesciali told Insider.

"If it finds any that it hasn't tweeted before, then it will send out a tweet about it," he said. "And then when they're all taken, they will send out another tweet saying that they're gone."

Bots have popped up across the US

The New Jersey and Kansas City bots are a part of a larger trend around similar tools that emerged on Twitter since January. Omar Darwish, a tech firm security engineer, created a number of vaccine bots in California cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles after he struggled to make an appointment for his grandmother in Texas, he told KRON4.

With more than 174,000 followers, the most popular vaccine bot on Twitter is TurboVax, created in January by New York City software engineer Huge Ma. Ma told The New York Times in February he developed the tool in less than two weeks for about $50.

"It's sort of become a challenge to myself, to prove what one person with time and a little motivation can do," Ma, 31, told the Times. "This wasn't a priority for governments, which was unfortunate. But everyone has a role to play in the pandemic, and I'm just doing the very little that I can to make it a little bit easier."

In April, Ma, who has been dubbed "VaxDaddy" was called to appear at a press conference with New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang. More than 20,000 people liked his tweet announcing his own vaccination.

It's not clear how many have used the tweets to schedule appointments, but dozens of people have thanked accounts, like those created by Hsu, Ma, and Carnesciali, for helping them get the vaccine.

"I hear it all the time," Carnesciali said. "People saying that they got theirs from it or that they got it for their whole family from the bot.

As more people become vaccinated, and fewer people search for appointments, Hsu said interest in these Twitter bots will likely wane, but he said that doesn't mean that these bots won't continue to be useful in the future.

Ma last week tweeted that traffic on the TurboVax website had dropped 70% from the week prior, a sign that the increased vaccine supply has tapered interest in finding an appointment in New York City.

"I'm exhausted! Looking forward to shutting the project down so I can live my life and pivot to influencing," he joked.