When Beth Rader was having a hard time finding a COVID vaccine appointment for her parents inJanuary, she turned to a new Facebook page for help in what had fast become a stampede for the most coveted product in the world.
Rader learned about a clinic at Kean University in Union, near her parents' home, and secured their appointments. Then she noticed other people posting to the site desperately seeking helpfor their loved ones — most of whom were elderly with underlying medical conditions.
And so Rader, who had the expertise (a background in digital fundraising) and the time (she was in between jobs), began spending 12 to 20 hours a day in her Washington D.C.-area apartmentfielding requests from strangers andbooking appointments on dozens of providers' websites.
"First it was relatives and friends and then it became distant relatives and friends of friends and soon enough it just snowballed into people I didn't have any connection to," said Rader, 30. "It was a really hard time for people."
As of mid-December, she hadmade a staggering 700 appointments in 10 states — the vast majority of them in New Jersey.
There have been countless acts of generosity and kindness carried out every day in 2021 by New Jerseyans for New Jerseyans.
But perhaps nowhere was this seen more than in the efforts of an army of vaccine volunteers who helped thousands of seniors, people with disabilities, the chronically ill, caregiversfor the homebound and so many more navigate a convoluted vaccination system.
They were regular folks — teachers, students, homemakers, the unemployed, congregants — who spent every day for monthsbooking appointments during a time of crisis, when hospitalizations were rising fast and New Jersey was averaging 60 to 80 deaths a day,about three to four times the rate today.
Their efforts were born out of necessity.
For the first few months of the campaign, New Jersey was receiving only 100,000 to 200,000 doses each week from the federal stockpileto inoculate the millions of stateresidents who qualified. The first month of the campaign went smoothly when it was limited to health care workers, nursing home residentsand first responders.
That ended on Jan. 13 when Gov. Phil Murphy unexpectedly made more than 2 million New Jerseyansimmediately eligibleand unwittingly created an unfairplaying field.
Murphy allowed anyone 65 years and older, people with chronic ailments and current and former smokers to book appointments.The pent-up demand overwhelmed a system that wasn't ready, despite months to prepare.Within a day, many providers were turning people away and closing down their appointment portals.
The vast majority of appointments could be booked only on a website, which forcedseniors, who had made up 80% of the state's COVID deaths, to compete withyounger,more tech-savvy people. A call center wasn't set up until a week later and had so many problems that it was forced to shut down temporarily.In order to avoid bureaucratic delays, no proof was required for those claiming underlying medical conditions or a smoking habit, but that also made the system ripe for cheating.
"It was a really rough time— especially if you were older," saidHoward Berger, 76, of Teaneck. "People were still dropping like flies and you were always worried that you were going to get COVID before you could get your shots."
As this was happening, a Facebook group debuted with the utilitarian name“New Jersey Covid Vaccine Info” — the brainchild of sistersBrittany Prell Cohen and Brandi Prell, who had booked an appointment for their grandmother after getting tips from a page for Florida residents.
Those seeking help flocked to the page. And so did volunteers, includingSandy Thompsonof Parsippany, who began making appointments and posting information on the page, all while raising two toddlers and studying for an MBA.
"There were many nights I would abandon food on the stove because I would get a notification that appointments were available," Thompson said with a laugh. "And then I would be on the computer with a 20-month-old on my lap."
At first, they spenthours onlinearound the clockrefreshingvaccine providerpages. Then they learned the patterns when pharmacy chains and hospitals posted newappointments — usually late at night or in the early-morning hours, when online traffic was lower.They usedtools such asTwitter notifications to know when a new slate of appointments became available,and autofill to loadsomeone'spersonal information into a site's online form as fast as possible.
Page membership kept growing, often by the tens of thousands a week.
Some of the volunteers even developed specialties. There were those such as Thompson who were good at getting essential information, from new providers toappointment tips, and blasting it out to followers.There were folks including Rader who became volume bookers thanks to their organizational skills and ability to manage large spreadsheets with the personal information ofthose seeking help.
Mary Chao:What part is rapid? For my NJ family, COVID testing was more like a marathon
Testing sites:Pop-up COVID testing sites opening in Wanaque and Trenton
What are the symptoms of omicron?:Answering your questions about the latest COVID variant
And then there were people such as Jeanne Marie Mirabella, who concentrated on the harder cases. Mirabella used her years navigating the social service system as a mental health counselor to help people with special needs and the homebound, or, as she putit,“to reach the hard to reach.”
Like many of the volunteers, her drive to help others was spurred partly by personal frustration with the system —her homebound sister was not able to get someone into her home for months to give her a shot. The state didn't have a system for the homebound until four tofive months into the campaign.
"It was intolerable to me that I couldn’t find one for her," Mirabella said. "Many of the homebound were at the highest risk of death. To me, it became a priority to help them."
The first sign of success came in early March, when the death toll at nursing homes — where residents had been an early target for the vaccine — hadplummeted, data showed. The same began for the general population in late April.
Recipients come in all shapes and sizes, but many are like Berger, who has had difficulty walking since undergoing surgery two years ago. He was able to get his first twoshots at a clinic set up near his home, with the help of local officials. But when the booster shot came out, that option no longer existed.
After contacting NorthJersey.com and The Record for help, Berger was put in touch with Dee Kalman, a Bergen County middle school teacher who has made more than 200 appointments for local residents. Not only did Kalman book the appointment, but she picked up Berger and drove him to a CVS in Hackensack.
“She doesn’t even know me and yet she came to my house and took me to my appointment,” Berger said. “Who does that?”
The Facebook page still has 131,000 members today. After the summer lull, activity has returned, with booster shots in demand and parents looking to book appointments for their kids.
Beth Rader has stacks of thank-you cards. Some people have sent her gift cards or donated to a charity she cares about. She even went to a Mets game over the summer with one of the peopleshe helped.
"People have stereotypes of what being from New Jersey is all about," she said. "Yeah, we like our bagels and we can be brash. But I think this was something that was so genuinely New Jersey. I’m in a group for folks in Virginia and D.C., and there isn’t the same level of community that we have with the New Jersey group.
"The world kind of sucks these days, and you need the good things," Rader said. "And this was one of them. It makes me really proud to be from New Jersey."
Scott Fallon has covered the COVID-19 pandemic since its onset in March 2020. To get unlimited access to the latest news about the pandemic's impact on New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email:fallon@northjersey.com
Twitter:@newsfallon
