Originally published at blog.vaccinateca.com on July 27, 2021.
July 27, 2021, THE VACCINATECA PROJECT
It’s bittersweet to announce that, after long and careful deliberation, over the next few weeks we’ll be winding down the Vaccinate the States project. We’ll be sharing much more — from our data to our learnings to our (very) detailed playbooks — soon, but for now, we wanted to let you know what to expect from our shutdown.
First, and most importantly: Winding down Vaccinate The States absolutely does not mean that we believe the pandemic is over. Quite the contrary. COVID-19 continues to be a significant risk to people both here in the United States and around the world, and it remains vital that every eligible person get vaccinated as quickly as possible.
However, based on our assessment of the current situation, we believe we’ve hit the point in the vaccination effort where it makes the most sense to devote all the extraordinary energy and time of our incredibly devoted staff and volunteers elsewhere. Finding accurate information about vaccination locations in your area is not the critical problem in the United States anymore. There are still many problems yet to be solved — but we believe other organizations are better equipped to solve them.
Vaccinate The States was always intended to be a short-term effort. At nearly six months, it’s already stretched longer — and had a deeper impact — than we ever anticipated.
Effective immediately, we’ve stopped updating our national dataset. We know there are organizations throughout California that still use our map embeds and data, so we will continue to maintain our California location list through August 2, and are working to maintain county-level data for specific partners through August 16. If you are using data from Vaccinate The States in production today and have not yet heard from us, please reach out to [email protected] as soon as possible.
We intend to make our data and playbooks freely available and open source for researchers, mutual aid groups, and any other interested parties.
We are truly grateful to have had the opportunity to support our communities in this small way. The COVID-19 pandemic has tested all of us in unprecedented ways, and it’s not over yet. Knowing we could help in some way has been the privilege of a lifetime.