Thread by @patio11

One of the greatest disconnects between people writing vaccination plans and the general public, not yet really corrected by consistent public messaging:

Pharmacies are expected to be a major vaccination channel but are often not tied to the central administration locally.

This is generally for structural reasons, often as simple as "Well we have no way to get data from their systems into our systems at the moment" or "Their supply chain doesn't talk to our supply chain."

The upshot of this is, because public messaging tends to feature public health departments and their websites very heavily, those get crushed under demand, have no remaining appointments, appointments get taken in minutes, etc.

Meanwhile pharmacies comparatively underused.

This is particularly the case with "mid-tier" pharmacies in our experience; large enough to have regional or national supply chains, but not sufficiently large in the public consciousness or vaccination plan to be special-cased like Walgreens or CVS.

"So what can we do about this?"

We're working on getting information about pharmacies into the places where people actually look.

As for you, if someone close to you is looking for vaccine, try calling around mid-tier pharmacies locally. It is surprisingly and widely effective.

It disconcerts me immensely that there are strategies for accessing healthcare and some strategies are more effective than others, and we are (in absence of a market) pricing access to the vaccine in units of strategic competence.

That was a foreseeable result, unfortunately.