I got a COVID vaccine shot the other day with the help of a friend. Another friend asked me for advice so I put this together for her. Now I’m sharing it with anyone who wants it. It might help, it might not. I hope it does. This info is mostly for NYC residents, though the NY State website is also here. For other states, I’m sorry but I can’t help. Wish I could.
The first place to go is:
It’s an aggregator. It shows pharmacies, churches, etc., plus City and State sites. It offers to show sites where the data is “stale,” meaning it hasn’t updated in 10 minutes. It’s worth clicking on that link, and then clicking through to any site you think you could get to if it had vaccine. They sometimes release appointments before the aggregator catches on.
On the aggregator are also links to
That’s the City site where I found my appointment. Any NYC resident is eligible to go to any NYC Vaccine Hub in any borough.
The City also has
This is the NYC Health and Hospitals site. I have a friend who found an appointment through H&H, though I never tried it.
There’s also
That’s the NY State site. Javits is a State location; there are 4 other State sites in the NYC area. Though it says “no appointments available” for everywhere except Potsdam, appointments, though very few, do come up at the other sites without them changing that message. Once you fill in your data, it pays to click on all the sites you could get to.
The key is to be persistent and check different sites at random times. The State sites all update on the hour. I don’t know when the City sites update. The dozen slots that I got my appointment in were only open for about ten minutes; I was just lucky that a friend was on the website right then and alerted me. It takes a village.
