Front Burner - Meet Vaccine Hunters Canada's volunteers

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

As multiple websites, crowded waiting lists and lines hundreds of people long impede some Canadians' attempts to get COVID-19 vaccine appointments, a community of volunteers is stepping in to help. Today, Vaccine Hunters Canada co-founders Andrew Young and Josh Kalpin on guiding thousands through the rollout.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. So you're eligible to get a vaccine in your province. And depending on where you live, you've called every pharmacy and joined every waitlist. And the virtual lineup, it just keeps getting longer. The wait time just went up. It just feels very anticlimactic. Or the website. In Alberta, it's broken.

And you need to hack the page just to enter your info. It just feels very anticlimactic. Or the website. In Alberta, it's broken. And you need to hack the page just to enter your info. It's copying, it's pasting, and then running a bit of code that then reveals the rest of the form. You waited in line at a pop-up in B.C. for more than four hours, only to get turned away. Did they tell you you would get it? Yeah, the security guy especially came up to me and said, I'll guarantee you $800. If they want vaccine guarantee, they can book our appointment. Maybe you stayed up all night in a similar line in Ontario. You know, people lined up here from about 2.30 a.m. last night. So there were hundreds and

hundreds of people who were asked to leave. A friend of mine literally wrote her name on a post-it note at a vaccine clinic in Toronto only to be lucky enough to have it pulled out of a lottery at the end of the day. For these or thousands of other reasons, maybe you just can't get the dose that you're looking for. Well, enter what I think may just be one of the most endearing stories to come out of the pandemic in Canada. A group of vaccine hunting volunteers. They call themselves vaccine hunters. The stories are endless. Their following is growing.

I actually was able to book my uncle, my dad, my aunt and my other uncle back to back. It just said online appointments available. So I clicked on the link and then we were booked. They're everyday Canadians, just like you and me, grabbing info on clinics and health units and pharmacies and letting you know where you can actually get your shot. Some volunteers are even making bookings for those who aren't able to do it themselves. You got to click it and then you got to call your person within 10 minutes or so to let

them know that this is a time that works for them. And it's kind of the same as just getting concert tickets. I'm Jamie Poisson, and today I'm here with the founders of Vaccine Hunters Canada, Josh Kalpin and Andrew Yang. All right. Hi, Josh. Hi, Andrew. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I have been looking forward to this conversation all week. Yeah. Thank you for having us. It's our pleasure. So, Andrew, maybe I'll start with you. Can you tell me how you started Vaccine Hunters Canada? How did it come about?

you started Vaccine Hunters Canada. How did it come about? So hi, this is my first interview with any media since this started. I'm a pretty shy guy. So a bit of background on Vaccine Hunters Canada. It started, I guess, officially on March 19th. This was after I had tried to book my dad at Sunnybrook. And I was literally wrestling with their system, trying to get his appointment in before it went down. And good news, I managed to. But then over the weekend, I realized that I consider myself pretty tech savvy. And I realized that not everyone out there has the benefit of being at a computer almost 24-7. So I came across vaccinehunter.org, which is a US-based site that focuses on leftover doses in the US at pharmacies. And I bought vaccinehunters.ca

and set up the Discord and Twitter account, ran it for a bit, and noticed that one specific person was contributing a lot of updates. And his name was Josh. Okay okay so josh that's how you jumped on board yeah uh i i found the website trying a similar situation to to andrew of of just trying to help family members book their appointments um especially when like astrazeneca went 55 plus and this whole hot spot thing started and andrew actually helped book my aunt. And she has a number of health conditions and lives in a hotspot. So it was a huge relief for her. And then I started paying that back to the community. And then I kept tagging Andrew about way too many times a day with all these different updates and things. And then eventually, I was number two. And that's how it

all got started. I think Andrew got sick of just hearing me tag things and just like, okay, Josh, you go do it yourself now. And look, Andrew mentioned he's pretty tech savvy. Tell me a little bit more about yourselves. I know you both have day jobs. What I can say is I work as a web developer for an educational institution in Toronto. Okay, and Josh, what about you?

I work as a software engineer for a pretty large fintech company that a lot of people have heard of, but I won't say what it is. Okay. Okay. So Andrew mentioned before Discord, and I want to get into that now, because I originally thought that Vaccine Hunters was just a Twitter feed. But I've since learned that it's more like this entire network. And so Josh, can you just tell me a bit about how it works and what it's made up of? Yeah, so there's kind of, I guess, three, well, I guess say four, we'll call it communications channels. That's a really fancy word that is basically just ways that we either get information or help people. So we have the Twitter feed, as you mentioned.

That's kind of our bread and butter, over 230,000 followers. Updates go out there all day. We now have a Facebook page that has well over 35,000 followers. That's become very, very popular. And that's hitting a different target segment that may not use Twitter, that's a little older, which is probably what we want. Then we have email, we get a ton of emails from people. But then there's Discord. And Discord, for those that don't know, is basically like a discussion forum chat server. So if anyone listening is use something like Microsoft Teams, or Slack, it's very similar to that, except it's it was originally more oriented for video games and things like that but it's actually a really great tool because you can assign things called roles

and people can see certain certain discussion forms based on where they live and things like that and that's where the core of our community is and where we get most of our extended team from is just people that are there helping out and then we identify those that are really helpful and great people and we bring them on as moderators to help keep the discussion under control. And then eventually, those people end up posting updates, kind of like how I did. So the Discord community, it's a community, really, it's people helping each other book appointments, figure out eligibility requirements, we have a growing team of medical people. They're not necessarily doctors, but they have either work at clinics, work in public health, are nurses.

You know, like it's kind of a beautiful thing to see where we kind of just are here to funnel information out to as many people as possible. But the community as a whole does all the hard work of finding all the information for us. Like we're not like manually checking pharmacy booking websites 90% of the time. It's just people are like, hey, this pharmacy has 100 appointments for the next three days. So that's how you're getting most of your information from? That's one way we get a lot of information. The newest thing that we're doing, and this was

announced recently, is we have a partnership with the City of Toronto, a formal partnership where they're providing us booking vacancies for the next day, every single day. But we also work with hospitals and other clinic providers across the province to try and both advertise their clinics and help make sure that the right people are getting to those clinics. So there's a lot of different ways that we get information. Most of it's from our community. But increasingly, we're working directly with those doing the clinics themselves to make sure that all the slots are being filled with eligible people. Okay. And I spent some time on the Discord, too.

And there's a real vibe to it. Hey, like, there's a whole page for memes. Andrew, i know that you've connected your spotify so people can see you listening to like k-pop in real time yes someone was blasting phoebe bridgers like over over a computer mic on one of the audio channels. And I should I should say on your Twitter account, in addition to now tweeting out information about where to get vaccines, like, you know, a pharmacy where where they have vaccines are now also doing like local restaurant recommendations. Whose idea was that? That was actually Sabrina's idea.

So we're a team of four directors and Sabrina's in charge of largely pharmacy updates. And she's the master of posting alerts and updates. Okay. Andrew, I understand you personally have spent tons of time helping individual people find vaccines. And can you give me an example or two? One highlight would be Jean Yoon from Kim's Convenience. Wow.

I didn't help her personally. I guess she saw one of our tweets earlier on. I guess she saw one of our tweets earlier on, and she saw that there was an availability for her age group in a hotspot postal code. And Josh mentioned the other one that we recently got. yesterday was the lead singer, Billy Talent, gave us a massive shout out on Twitter for those that know the band, saying that he got his shot because of our tweets. The list goes on and on. There's just so many people. It's kind of insane.

It's one of these things where you help a few people directly and then it causes this giant web of cascading helping across the entire country. So it's actually beautiful to see. It really is. Well, speaking of that sort of web of cascading helping, we spoke with two of your most dedicated hunters, people who have been helping people on your platform, but also using the information on your platform and reaching into their communities to find people who need vaccines. And they've helped scores of people find vaccines and advise a lot of people who are vaccine hesitant or don't

know if they're eligible. And I want to actually play you some clips from a conversation that our producer Derek had with them. So maybe we can just take a listen to that now. Hi, I'm Bea Sardon, and I'm from Toronto, Ontario. I'm a student from York University, and I'm a vaccine hunter. I went looking for vaccines because my dad's 50 plus and I have had health conditions over the past year or so so I posted on the server hey I'm looking for an appointment for my dad 50 plus here at New York and then I think maybe 10 minutes 15 minutes later the founder got back to me and say hey I have a spot do you want it and I'm yes. And then he booked my dad. And then from then on, I decided to pay it forward. I think it's very easy for me to book appointments because

my school is online. I have two monitors. I could have my Zoom class on my right side. And my main monitor would be for me looking at appointments. And I guess the barrier is that these people, they do shift work and they don't have the time to keep clicking on these websites and if they do they probably don't have the time to understand the system the fastest i found someone appointment was i think two minutes i guess you could say that it's almost a game for me, but I think it's more the adrenaline. Once you find an appointment, you gotta grab it. I don't know if you've had that feeling of getting concert tickets for K-pop concerts and you just want to get the front row.

That's kind of the feeling for me with just calling my person and be like, does this work for you? Please just let me know. my person and be like, does this work for you? Please just let me know. Recently, I drove a care worker to her vaccine appointment. And the reason I drove her was because I felt bad that I booked her kind of far. So I was like, you know what, I'll drive you. It's all good. It'd be nice to get out anyways. So I did. did but really I'm just a kid with two monitors time and the ability and just the willingness to help and some people have reached out to me what do I do how can I do this and I'm just like you just start honestly you just take that first step of reaching out to someone you don't know and you know that they haven't been vaccinated or

even if they haven't vaccinated and just be like, hey, do you need any help? So hi, my name is Caitlin Gonsalves. I'm a research scientist in healthcare medicine, infectious diseases, and a community healthcare advocate. I live in Toronto in Scarborough, and I'm a vaccine hunter. There were so many barriers to finding my family vaccines. I come from an Indian Kenyan background, and we've been here for a long time, but no matter how long you've been here, you still, it's still difficult to understand the system. And the worst part is that vaccines are here. They're down the street, they're in the city, but we don't know where they are. It was excruciatingly difficult trying to figure that out for myself. So when I found a source that

was figuring that out for everyone else as well, I was like, oh, this is what I've already been doing anyways. This just helps make it a little bit easier. We lost count of how many people you help out because there's just so many people to help. Sometimes they're very starkingly eligible and we're surprised that they haven't been vaccinated yet. But it's the fact that all of these people have so many personal stories that they fall through the cracks. The rest of the system has not caught up to understand that a lot of people do not have family doctors to refer to or have moved a couple times and haven't changed anything on their health card or lost their health card and don't have it or are here on a different status

or aren't Canadian citizens. It would not be true if I was to say that I'm not exhausted. I think I spend eight to 10 hours a day helping people get vaccines in my community and virtually on Discord as part of Vaccine Hunters because people don't deserve to die. Nobody deserves to die of COVID. Nobody deserves to be intubated alone in an ICU. And I've had my own personal loss with COVID. Last week, my cousin died. And in February, another one of my family members died, both from COVID, both in the ICU.

It fueled me in a way that I don't, as other racialized people, I don't get to process grief because there's more work to be done. But I feel an ethical and moral duty as a brown woman in medicine to make sure that nobody else has to also die alone in an ICU. When it's preventable, for the most part, preventable Bea was probably talking about you when she said that the founder helped her get an appointment for her father. And listening to Bea and Caitlin talk about what they're doing right now, I wonder what your reaction to that is. How does it feel listening to that? Very humbling and touching.

Bea was one of the first members on Discord. She's helped out a lot. And just to touch on what she mentioned, random acts of kindness is contagious, if I can use that word. And it's sort of like a help someone and they'll help others type of situation. And just to touch on the second interview, our focus is to keep things accurate and simple. And one of our focuses is to focus on the disadvantaged communities or vulnerable essential workers who aren't able to be on a computer 24-7.

So we're actively looking into different ways to help them. Josh, how about you? What do you think when you hear those stories? It's powerful. Like, Bea, we jokingly call her Batman, but the amount of people that she has helped, it's unbelievable, like unbelievable. And Caitlin's story just rips my heart out. And she's channeling that pain into something

beautiful. That that's what we need to do is where the country is hurting a lot right now. A lot of people are hurting a lot right now. I think almost every single person in this country or even on focusing on Ontario knows someone that's had COVID has been in the hospital for COVID or has died of COVID at this point. And the fact that both of them are able to take this this horrible thing that's happening in the world and channel into something that's so powerful and helping so many people, I think is, as Andrew put it, it's humbling. It's an honor to be able to help to facilitate this.

And it's hard to put it fully into words. It's just an absolutely beautiful thing. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

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I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. You know, one thing I wanted to talk to you both about, for sure, we just heard from Bea and Caitlin how they're helping people in their communities. And that's amazing. You know, one thing that I'm not sure we've been able to mention yet is Bea is Filipino, and she speaks Tagalog. And obviously, that's been so helpful in her being able to reach so many people in her community. But what would you say to the criticism I've also heard that the

platform is also making it easier for people to sweep in and take vaccines from those who may need them most. So for example, by showing up at a pharmacy in a harder hit neighborhood that you've posted about on Twitter, for example. Josh, what would you say to that? What I would say is that we work within the framework of whatever the eligibility criteria that's set by the various provinces and public health units are. And we can't change that. I think if there's no location restriction on pharmacies, people will go there no matter what. But what we're seeing is that I think there's this false assumption being made that essential workers or whatever don't have

family members that are internet savvy or maybe a bit stronger in English or things like that. And I think that assumption bothers me a bit because what we're seeing is that there's someone in a family, we saw this with Scarborough when they opened up the eligibility to 18 plus everyone in Scarborough. You'd have one person in the family book appointments for 15 family members in their entire family. That's all their uncles and aunts, their parents, their siblings, everyone. And it's impossible for us as an organization to reach everyone. And we're just here to supplement that.

just here to supplement that. And if we can get as much information to as many people as possible, we're hoping those people, and we've seen this, will go reach out to those that aren't on their computers all day. Maybe essential workers going into work all day can't check appointments and help them book an appointment or find somewhere for them to book an appointment. Yes, I wanted to add on to Josh's points. Please. Specifically on pharmacies, we've set up a portal where we have some pharmacy partners who submit requests for us to post an alert on any expiring doses of AstraZeneca. And most of our pharmacy posts have been for pharmacies with expiring doses. So we've actually been helping pharmacies not throw out any doses. And we've heard back a lot of positive feedback from these pharmacies. Right. So essentially, if you didn't exist, you know, maybe those doses would be going to waste. Are you working, Andrew, at all, to coordinate with clinics or pharmacies to make sure that you aren't, like, necessarily overwhelming them?

Oh, yeah. Josh can speak to that. Yeah. One of the things that I mentioned before is we have this partnership with the City of Toronto and with a number of not formal partnerships, but we have contacts at basically every hospital in Toronto and more and more across the country of different regions and cities. intentionally causing a little bit of chaos at one of these like pop-up clinics where we couldn't get a straight answer on what the eligibility was. And after that, Michael Guerin Hospital reached out to us and said, can we talk? We don't want this to happen again. And I think one thing I like to say is that out of chaos comes partnership. And since then, now we work with basically every hospital in Toronto. And I'm going to focus on Toronto just so people understand. There are more mobile clinics happening here than everywhere else in the province combined. And most of them are walk-ins.

So we have to get this right. And our goal with them is to not overwhelm the clinics, to make sure that we're not sending people that aren't eligible. And we have this traffic light system, we call it, that lets us do that. So green means we're going to go crazy on Twitter, and you see all of our very hyped up all caps posts telling people to go to a clinic very, very quickly and fill up doses. Yellow means that we're going to hold off pushing it out to our socials, but we'll share it with our community so we can get at those people that are more at risk and vulnerable until a certain period of time.

Basically, when the clinic tells us to send it out or the night before or the morning before, who knows? It depends. And then we have red, which is very much this is a very targeted clinic. So think of seniors buildings. targeted clinic. So think of seniors buildings, you have a lot of very scared seniors and having 1000 people show up at a seniors building clinic that that's not cool. Same thing with things like clinics targeted the homeless population, or targeted very specific racialized populations. We respect all of the wishes of the clinics to how we advertise things. Well, that's so helpful to understand what's going on here when I'm watching what you're

posting and when you're posting it. Josh, you mentioned this partnership with the City of Toronto and other partnerships that you have. There are people who will say that these partnerships are maybe indicative of a failure with the system here, that you are doing the job that governments should be doing. And I wonder how you would respond to that. I think when the Toronto partnership came out, there was a lot of, I'll call it hot takes, that the city should be paying us to do this. Our whole team found those incredibly upsetting

because that's on the assumption that we want to be paid. As of now, we are not taking any donations. We're not taking any money from anyone. We are doing this because we want to help the country. And I think the city of Toronto recognized that we're a tool that they can use to help improve things. We have 200 something thousand people that are paying attention to us and listen to us.

If the city didn't want to use us, I would say they were crazy. Like we're a tool that we can help reach more people. If this isn't about whether the rollout's good or not, we have a group of people that we reach to and we just want to reach people and help them and get them their vaccines. And it's really good that we can do that. It's not a bad thing. We can't control what the government decides to do. That's where we're not in politics. We don't set policies. We're apolitical. But we're here to work with whoever we can to get this job done. And that's all we care about is just get the job done. And Andrew, you know, tell me a little bit more about some of the reaction that you've gotten from,

from the thousands of people that you've been able to help before we go today. It's, it's like a serotonin therapy, just reading through all the mentions on Twitter, all the comments on Facebook, the emails that we get. It's just been an amazing experience. And it wouldn't have been possible without Josh, Sabrina, Jonathan, and all of our volunteers. Jonathan and all of our volunteers. I really, really hope that you guys all get to meet each other and that you can celebrate for, for all the work that you've done. Oh yeah. We've been secretly hoping that we could get a drink after this is all

done and over with Dr. Bogosh and Dr. Tian. Yeah, perfect. Isaac is on the show all the time. Dr. Isaac Bogosh and Dr. Tian. Yeah, perfect. Isaac is on the show all the time. Dr. Isaac Bogosh. So I also would like to get a drink with all of you, frankly, when all of this is over. I just want to thank you guys so much for all the work that you're doing. It's really inspiring. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so before we go today, Josh from Vaccine Hunters Canada had one more thing that he wanted to add. One criticism that is sometimes valid with us is that we're a little Ontario-centric. So if anyone here is listening and don't live in Ontario and want to help out, we would love more tips, information, people that are excited about other provinces across Canada and territories as well. as well. So if you're in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Maritimes, any of the territories and want to help out, hop into our Discord or send us a Twitter DM or something like that, because we would love more people contributing across the country. Okay, that is all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner. We'll talk to you tomorrow.