Want a Covid-19 Shot? Get on Eventbrite.

The complicated tech of vaccine appointments

As counties across the United States roll out their Covid-19 vaccination programs, many are turning to a grab bag of improvised technologies to register residents, schedule appointments, and allocate doses. These range from traditional phone trees to creaky and outdated internal systems to Google Forms to the consumer ticketing website Eventbrite. This piecemeal approach has led to frustration among those seeking vaccines, created thorny access issues, and revealed concerns about data privacy and scams. With the United States beginning to vaccinate those 65 and older this week, the problems will only get worse.

Earlier this month, thousands of Floridians found themselves in the bizarre position of registering for a potentially lifesaving medical treatment using Eventbrite, a website that usually sells concert tickets. As Vice reports, Florida’s Collier, Brevard, Manatee, Monroe, Volusia, Pasco, Sarasota, and Seminole counties used or are currently using the platform to allocate vaccines to seniors and health care workers. Others are likely to follow. The counties reportedly turned to the site after their phone lines were overwhelmed by people calling to make vaccine appointments. Two of my own relatives in Florida spent eight hours repeatedly calling multiple phone numbers for counties around the state. They finally secured a vaccination appointment in Broward County and drove over two hours to get their shots.

Jesi Ray, a communications professional for Florida’s Brevard County, reportedly told The Verge that phone lines in her own county had been overwhelmed and that Eventbrite “is the only option we have right now. This is the quickest, easiest, and most efficient way that we can think of to help the department of health solve this issue right now.”

The page for Brevard County’s vaccination program looks essentially like the page for any other Eventbrite event. It includes a slick header with a stock photo of the Covid-19 vaccine in a glass vial, social sharing buttons, an option to “like” the event, and tags including “Things to Do in West Vieira, Florida” (with shutdowns, it’s hopefully one of the only things to do in West Vieira, Florida). Clicking on the page’s “Select a Date” button brings up a list of upcoming dates and times, all of which were marked as “sold out” as of this writing. The county announces the release of new slots on Twitter, among other methods.

On the social media platform, users reported refreshing the county’s Eventbrite page frequently and waiting hours for slots to open (many are reportedly filled in as little as 10 minutes) as well as having trouble loading the Eventbrite page. Twitter user JohnCn wrote, “Clicked within seconds of your SMS message and Twitter post. The link is down.”

Elsewhere on Twitter, users found the process of registering for Covid-19 vaccines on Eventbrite daunting or simply surreal. Dawnielle Minch wrote, “Desperately refreshing on Eventbrite to get my parents one of 200 Covid vaccines in Sumter Co, Florida is just too stressful” (she ultimately reported successfully finding an appointment slot). Yviedoesit wrote, “Just booked tickets to a virtual stand-up comedy show on Eventbrite and remembered that it’s also how my college roommate is scheduling a COVID vaccine appointment for her parents.”

In addition to the challenges associated with the limited availability of Covid-19 vaccines, using online platforms like Eventbrite also brings up all kinds of access issues. As the New York Times reports, many Florida residents don’t have internet access or access to modern devices, putting them at a disadvantage in securing a shot. Because many vaccine recipients are over 65 years old, they may be less familiar with using Eventbrite than younger residents. The Times reports that many seniors are turning to their tech-savvy children and grandchildren to reserve slots on their behalf. Those without family members — as well as the homeless or residents who speak a language other than English — may be out of luck.

Using a third-party platform like Eventbrite has also led to concerns about scams. The Florida attorney general’s office said in a consumer alert that “according to recent news reports, scammers used the popular event website Eventbrite to pose as county health departments and take or attempt to take payments in exchange for COVID-19 vaccine appointments.” Eventbrite denied this, saying in a statement that the pages in question were created due to user error, not malicious intent. Eventbrite also created a resource page for those seeking to obtain vaccines through the platform. The page provides resources for identifying legitimate vaccination events and for reporting potentially fraudulent ones.

Other registration methods create fraud concerns, too. The AARP warned its members that tech-driven Covid-19 vaccine scams are on the rise around the country. Many of these scams involve robocalls, fake postings on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter offering vaccines, and phishing emails telling seniors that they can reserve an early dose of the vaccine for a fee, the AARP says.

Even without outright fraud, though, entrusting a technology platform to help distribute vaccines creates potentially serious privacy risks. Eventbrite’s privacy policy states that the company “may use your Personal Data for our marketing and advertising purposes.” If people register for vaccination events, Eventbrite could likely assume that they’d received the Covid-19 shot. The company could then use their vaccine-positive status to serve them ads or attempt to sell them products.

It could, for example, market travel opportunities to people who had been vaccinated or use vaccine status to target them with ads for in-person concerts or events. Ticketmaster has reportedly begun building a framework for verifying vaccination status at concerts, so the idea of Eventbrite predicting vaccine status based on a person attending a vaccination event isn’t outlandish. Eventbrite did not respond to questions about its use of Covid-19 event attendance for marketing purposes.

Still, despite these risks, there are compelling benefits to using a platform like Eventbrite to handle vaccine registrations — especially when few better options are available. The site is designed to handle massive fluctuations in server load as thousands of people attempt to register for slots at once, has 99.99% uptime, and, as of 2016, had “100 dedicated engineers” working to ensure its stability. It also has measures in place to avoid scams, like releasing payments to event organizers only once an event is actually complete.

Many states’ internal systems may not be up to the technical challenge of handling large numbers of users attempting to register for shots. Technologist Lizzie O’Leary, for example, says that she was “on the verge of tears” when she attempted to secure her mother a vaccine using the New York State system, reached “the final confirmation page where I affirmed all the statements were true. And the page crashed.” Georgia’s scheduling page reportedly crashed as well during the rollout of its own campaign.

Systems from individual hospitals and medical systems suffer from many of the same challenges. Heather Knight of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote on Twitter that Bay Area HMO Kaiser Permanente had 10,000 callers on hold waiting for a vaccine appointment, leading to wait times as long as 17 hours. Her father called the number at 6 a.m. and waited on hold for two hours before receiving an appointment. Some health systems and counties appear to have turned to tech tools including Google Docs to sign up residents — the vaccine website for Prince William County in Virginia, for example, directs residents to a Google Form to register their interest in receiving a vaccine.

The choice to use these piecemeal tools may be less about selecting the best possible platform and more about working within the constraints of the limited resources devoted to vaccine rollouts, as well as the technical fragility of their own internal systems, and increasingly urgent mandates to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Because registrations are handled at a county level, many counties are likely scrambling to assemble programs quickly and using a combination of different readily available platforms like Eventbrite to handle scheduling (my own county uses Microsoft Forms for registration).

Absent a coordinated federal campaign akin to the centrally coordinated campaigns in countries like Israel, this piecemeal approach will likely remain the norm for some time. Frustration on the part of those denied vaccines, access issues associated with using tech-heavy platforms to handle distribution, and the privacy issues inherent in trusting tech companies with vaccination data will likely remain, too.

For now, though, Eventbrite and platforms like it may be the best solution available for coordinating vaccination in many places — or at least they may be no worse than other solutions. Going forward, though, the challenges with today’s rollout reveal the importance of investing in technology for distributing vaccines before those technologies are actually needed. That way, during the next pandemic, the people handing out lifesaving medicine won’t be the same people handing out tickets to Taylor Swift shows.