Booking an appointment to get a covid vaccine can be frustrating. The good news is there are people who want to help
Call them vaccine hunters. They scour websites and make phone calls to help strangers their shots. Kimberly Jenkins is a moderator on a Facebook group in Houston. She says it's no small task. "I do this all day long.
I wake up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. I see 100 people trying to join the group and I accept them. It's all night, all day."
She says when she joined there were 500 members and now there are ten thousand. Jenkins says many people have gotten appointments within minutes of logging on. "We provide the links to CVS, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, and they're like 'oh my God, I just became a member and now I've got an appointment for my vaccine.'"
Austin's Julie Ziegleman lost her job because of the pandemic. "My brain started going to mush." She say many, especially older people were having a hard time getting an appointments. "They couldn't figure out how to navigate all these different places. I had the capability of doing this so I decided to do it."
She noticed on NextDoor people were helping others find appointments, so she started there. She also posted on Facebook that she was helping people. "One of the people I know happened to have breast cancer and she started forwarding other people that had breast cancer to me. Other people as well with special needs kids, kids with Downs Syndrome, kids with Rett's Syndrome. I actually helped a mom the other day. Her child has been at Dell hospital since the beginning of January. I was the most happy about that because I can't imagine she wanted to leave her kid, but she also has been trying to get vaccinated so when she's going in to the hospital she's safe."
The reward is in the helping. "They are getting vaccinated. I'm like thank you for being part of the herd immunity. I'm working towards getting people vaccinated and working towards herd immunity one person at a time."
Jenkins echoes that. She believes her group has helped nine thousand people get a vaccine. I told her she was literally saving lives. "I'd like to think so. I really do. And just helping people I don't know....with everything that's happened in the past year, it just makes everything seem better."
At a glance, there are vaccine hunter groups on Facebook not only in Houston and Austin, but in North Texas, South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley.
