CDC launches nationwide site to help people find Covid-19 vaccine providers

CDC launches VaccineFinder tool to locate Covid-19 vaccine providers Federal officials have quietly opened up access to VaccineFinder, which lets the public to search for approved Covid-19 vaccine providers. Katie Palmer STAT

Federal officials Wednesday quietly opened up access to VaccineFinder, a site that allows the U.S. public to search nationwide for approved Covid-19 vaccine providers.

On vaccinefinder.org, users can enter an address or ZIP code and select a search area — say, within 10 miles — and get a list of providers with contact information, eligibility criteria, and, when available, a link to a vaccine scheduler. Critically, users will also be able to see whether each provider has doses available.

VaccineFinder is an answer to scattered and siloed systems that have made it difficult for many to find timely, accurate information about where and when they can get a shot. But the site won’t help everyone, everywhere — not just yet.

The site will only include inventory data from 29,000 providers to start, roughly a quarter of the national total. They will include locations in four states — Alaska, Indiana, Iowa, and Tennessee — along with providers registered in the federal pharmacy program.

The decision to limit the initial rollout of the tool comes on the heels of several high-profile failures of state sites to enable vaccine location and scheduling, tools that couldn’t manage the crush of millions of people trying to find vaccine information at once. ...

There’s another important feature of the site, though, that has been up and running since the beginning of the vaccine rollout. It had to be. On its surface, VaccineFinder is a definitive tool to help the public answer one highly personal question. But buried in its back end is a dataset that allows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fill in its own blanks about real-time vaccine supply. ...