If We Have a Hero, It Means the System Is Not Working
How a discussion over a Shabbat lunch led to the launch of a vaccine distribution startup.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Wendy Bensussan, in honor of the leaders of our Jewish schools, educators, administrative and support staff who have gone above and beyond all expectations to keep our schools open and our children safe during the pandemic. Thank you for your hard work and dedication.
Hey everyone,
I’m excited to share this story about a local startup that just launched to efficiently decrease vaccine waste and confusion. Before jumping in, just a couple of thoughts for this sunny Friday. When I published the story on our Jewish schools finding a way to make in-person education work, I was nervous. But after watching the fights to open public schools around the country the past couple of months, I feel vindicated. It’s like all of a sudden, everyone woke up and was like, “Hey, maybe kids should be in school. How can we make that happen, guys? Guys?” This is not to minimize the challenges whatsoever. And I won’t lie and say I didn’t think it was all going to come crashing down when our school had a teacher test positive two weeks ago. But, brass tacks: Kids should be in school. No, they don’t produce immediate economic effects in the way opening bars and shops do. It’s a long game. What if we treated teachers like frontline workers — like, say, nurses? What if we started to view parents as essential workers? We don’t prioritize kids. We need to prioritize kids.
Shabbat shalom.
—Emily
If We Have a Hero, It Means the System Is Not Working
Distressed by chaotic vaccine distribution, a few Seattle Jews launched a startup to match spare vaccines with people in need.
On January 28, a freezer holding some 1,600 doses of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine went down at Kaiser Permanente in Seattle. As word got out, hundreds of people from around the city lined up and waited throughout the night in hopes of getting injected with the temperature-sensitive and about-to-expire vaccines. This chaotic episode ended in an inspiring story for the Covid chronicles: no vaccines went to waste.
“Everyone’s reactions were like, ‘What a heroic effort, they didn’t waste any doses.’ It is an inspiring story,” says Dina Levitan, who lives in North Seattle. (Disclosure: Levitan is a personal friend.) “[But] in my background in organizational management, we had a saying: no heroes. If we have a hero, it means the system is not working.”
Levitan was discussing this with Caine Jette two days later, over Shabbat lunch, when she realized they’d hit on an idea. After Shabbat ended, Levitan drafted a strategy for matching spare vaccines with people in need. She sent it to Jette, who works at GitHub. He realized she was serious, and that this could work. “Dina sent me a Google Doc and I was like, ‘Holy crap, let’s do this.’” Within about six weeks, they had assembled a team, built a website, created a strategy, and incorporated as a nonprofit. JitVax — Just in Time Vaccines — was live.
Distribution of the Covid vaccine has been a challenge. Everyone knows someone who needed it and couldn’t get it, who ran out the door when their doctor called, or who waited in line at the end of the day at a vaccination site as if hoping for free Cinnabon as the food court closes.
While a freezer failure was just one of those ill-timed malfunctions of life, it was one of many moments the non-plan for distributing the vaccine became clear. It was neither the first nor the last.
“Sometimes the thing that spurs me to action is when I get frustrated,” Levitan says. “Just hearing stories about doctors who ran hospital departments who could not find the right person to give the vaccine to…. The hard part of this problem is not the technology piece. The hard part is the human piece, the systemic issues.”
“Sometimes the thing that spurs me to action is when I get frustrated…. The hard part of this problem is not the technology piece. The hard part is the human piece, the systemic issues.”
JitVax is a pretty simple concept: Go to jitvax.com, and enter your zip code and phone number. When a leftover or spare vaccine becomes available nearby, the system sends you a text message. The notifications identify which CDC phase the vaccine is available for; if more vaccines still remain, a notification goes out to the general population for “just-in-time” vaccines.
“The fundamental problem is communication,” says Jette regarding spare vaccines. “There’s no waitlist. There is emergency communication, but that’s only for big emergencies…. It’s really just about telling people things, and that’s not that hard to do. You can build a website and send out targeted texts. It’s very straightforward.”
If it’s so easy, why couldn’t our local or national government come up with a plan that would not be just intentional and organized, but also fair and equitable? It’s both the beauty and the tragedy of American life that so much progress comes down to entrepreneurs fed up with broken or ineffective systems. As the systems fell apart, that’s when the problems became clear, says Jette. “Now we’re seeing the holes in the plan.”
“You don’t know what you don’t know,” adds Levitan. “We’ve never had a country-wide mass vaccination.”
Solving complex problems across teams and functional areas is Levitan’s passion. She holds a bachelor’s and a master’s in engineering from MIT and is currently working full time for an experience engineering consulting firm, while also working on her MBA at UW’s Foster School. (She is also a new mom.) Her team is comprised of 10 volunteers and friends, many from Seattle’s Jewish community, who have expertise in tech, marketing, design, and healthcare.
Julia Bruk, an art director at Amazon whose work spans graphic design, filmmaking, photography, festival curation, and beyond, jumped in to help with design. (Another disclosure: I connected Bruk with Levitan — Seattle is small.) Bruk had recently complained in a Facebook post about clunky government websites with terrible user interface in the search for a vaccine site. She wants to bring “dignity back to the arts,” in part by highlighting the critical role of design in thinking about accessible solutions.
“There’s a lot of inequitable distribution of the vaccine. I was excited that JitVax takes that seriously,” she says. In addition to her professional and creative work, Bruk also cares for her grandmother and a disabled brother, so vaccine access is personal for her. Through research and conversations, she’s found consensus that information about the vaccine has been “confusing and frustrating” — all the more so for senior populations and those who lack fluency in English. Design, in this case, ranges from using the technology to build trust to how it looks and makes the user feel. A critical piece is making sure the website makes sense and functions well for a diverse audience.
“As we learn more and talk to more providers, something that has come to the fore is health equity. It’s not going away,” says Levitan. Medical care is not always communicated in a consistent or intentional way, resulting not only in missed opportunities but also in potential system fails across populations. “I spoke to a doctor who spent an entire Saturday calling all his less privileged patients making sure they could get in [to a vaccine clinic],” Levitan says. “That’s not a sustainable plan.”
“I spoke to a doctor who spent an entire Saturday calling all his less privileged patients making sure they could get in [to a vaccine clinic]. That’s not a sustainable plan.”
Levitan is uniquely interested in the senior population (she served as a board fellow at Kline Galland last year) and how to serve their needs, which are often inhibited by mobility and tech savvy. “The people who are home bound, there is no plan,” she says. “There is no plan for those people. We need to know how we’re going to solve that problem.”
It’s also critical that the interface be simple. JitVax doesn’t require any personal details or insurance information. There’s no need for an elaborate form that’s not only arduous to complete but also subject to the whims of unstable internet connections. They rely on a study that found text messaging to be a tool for health literacy, thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones.
The JitVax team is in talks with providers on both coasts, and they continue to map out plans for reaching elderly and underserved communities. In the meantime, Levitan is happy to see how it goes. “I am committed to seeing if we can make a difference in the short term,” she says. “Then maybe we’ll know if we have traction, or maybe the government will step in and solve it. I would be happy if there was no need for our service.”
Meanwhile, other initiatives are entering the fray, creating potential competition. But the team doesn’t see it as a threat. “One of the things we said was, ‘This is such a big problem, there’s definitely room for multiple people to be helping,’” says Levitan. “Even if we can make a difference in our neighborhood, that would be valuable.”
Community Announcements
This week’s parasha is Vayakhel-Pekudei. The tabernacle gets designed. Bezalel and Oholiav get infused with God’s wisdom and inspiration. It rubs off on the Israelites, who then go overboard with decorations.
Candlelighting is at 5:53 p.m.
Change the clocks Saturday night!
Check out the Seattle Jewish community calendar.
Shoutouts!
Shoutout to my NYHS journalism students for launching their first real student paper, and to Galit Berezansky for “scooping” JTA and The Times of Israel with her touching article on sitting shiva in the time of Covid. —Emily Alhadeff
In memory of Art Ambrose, z"l —the Rivkin Family