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White House has deflected criticism of the issue, Assistant Press Secretary Kevin Munoz Tell edge Errors are “only a small part of the overall experience”. Press secretary Jen Psaki added: “In our view, every website is at risk. We can’t guarantee that there won’t be one or two mistakes.”
But as has often happened during this government-failed pandemic, citizens stepped in through the internet.
Almost as soon as the site launched, Twitter posts started appearing among people wanting to donate tests, and some groups last year that helped people find vaccine appointments began turning to helping people get tested. For example, the Facebook group Maryland Vaccine Hunters, which started outsourcing crowdsourced information about vaccine appointments, is now posting updated details on where to buy rapid tests and promoting test donations.
Mutual aid organizations — community-based organizations that provide goods and services to those in need — have gone mainstream during the pandemic and have become increasingly active by providing protective equipment, helping people book vaccine appointments and, more recently, distributing tests.
One such group is For Your City, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that works with the city’s homeless. To figure out who needs testing, Serve Your City turned to data collected from a hotline it set up to help vulnerable people get vaccine appointments.
Still, these crowdsourced jobs have a problem: they require reliable access to the internet. Maryland Vaccine Hunters has a lot of people on Facebook willing to donate tests. But how do they help people without internet access?
Alternative routes to getting a test are fraught with problems. Aside from the quirks of the online form, the White House didn’t set up a hotline until days after the launch, so people who needed to use the phone couldn’t get help. It’s also unclear who oversees the fair distribution of tests: representatives on the hotline referred us to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which in turn referred us to the White House, which did not respond to a request for comment. Neither does the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or the U.S. Postal Service.
That means people who desperately need these tests continue to struggle to get them.
“This demographic has been the hardest hit by the coronavirus,” Levy said of her clients. “They are disabled, have limited resources, and a lot of them are black or Hispanic. They are very vulnerable people.” On January 24, Levy called the hotline numerous times to try to place orders for residents of her building, but again she didn’t success.
Additional reporting by Ailing Guo.
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