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There are two important websites most New Yorkers should have bookmarked right now: TurboTax, that stalwart of every tax season, and a brand-new site with just a single letter changed: TurboVax.
The new site is the brainchild of Huge Ma, a software engineer for Airbnb, who tells The New York Times that he was motivated to build a better portal for local NYC vaccination appointments after he found it so difficult to make one for his mother.
The free website, which is now live, compiles availabilities from 43 disparate city and state vaccine sites and then sends them in real time to an automatically updated Twitter account. (Don’t have a Twitter? You can also go to the main site and continuously refresh the page to be updated about new appointments.)
Perhaps most embarrassingly for many of the more official resources, the superior site took Ma only $50 and two weeks to compile. It joins fellow volunteer resources to help connect New Yorkers with available appointments like NYC Vaccine List, which checks the websites of clinics, pharmacies and other locations.
The city and state are both trying to ramp up the delivery of vaccines to New Yorkers at the moment, recently converting the iconic Yankee Stadium into a vaccine hub and expanding the list of New Yorkers now eligible to sign up for an appointment. The effort is being made, in part, to outpace the spread of new, more contagious variants of the various first discovered in the UK, South Africa and Brazil.
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