After seeing a lot of folks struggling to find vaccine appointments I started to look up appointments before I was elegable. I'm psudo-unemployed so I figured I'd spend some time getting a lay of the land. I booked my first dose appointment with a couple of days of my elegability and have been successful in helping a few friends find appointments. So I figured I'd share tips I learned along the way, hopefully they'll help. YMMV.
A couple of points before getting going:
- I'm in the US so this is all based on what it's like to find an appointment in the US.
- I'm in CO so these are from a CO perspective, but I think they're pretty widely applicable.
- I'd welcome adding additional tips and any info that might be relevant to a specific state/country. Send a PR with an update.
Note: This is just a general guide for finding an appointment. Please get any medical advice from your dr., follow your local rules/laws/elegability guidelines, and of course anything the FDA/CDC/other authoraties say overrides anything here.
There's currently (at the time this was written) 3 vaccines approved in the US:
- Pfizer - 2 doses 21 days apart
- Moderna - 2 doses 28 days apart
- J&J - 1 dose
Once you get your first dose (for Pfizer or Moderna) then you should automatically get your second dose scheduled. So the guide is really on finding that first dose.
There are a lot of places that are offering vaccines right now, most all pharmacys do. That means a lot of grocrey stores offer bookings. When they release new appointments they tend to go quickly. So the real key is to have an understanding for a particular place releases new appointments and then going to their site and booking quickly!
If you have the ability to drive or catch a ride a few towns over it can greatly increase your chances of finding something. Smaller towns tend to have more appointments around for longer and larger ones/cities can be exceptionally hard to nail down an appointment a the closest pharmacy.
This is a list of places and why they tend to release new appointments. The exact times can flucuate and might be a bit different depending upon your location. But, I've found these to be fairly accurate for predicting when to find a slew of new appointments at a given place. The links here are the deepest links to any particular site I could find.
Walgreens:
New Appointments: Saturaday Mornings, early. Look around 5am MT
Note: You input a city/state/zip and it does a 25 mile radius search. Might try changing the search zip code.
CVS:
New Appointments: Sunday Mornings, early. Look around 5-6am MT
Note: They have a long form to fill out. But, they also show you, up front, which stores have availablitly and which do not.
Pharmaca:
New Appointments: Thursdays. Look just after midnight MT.
Note: The first apointment you chose will likely be gone by the time you finish filling out their form. But if you go back and pick another time/date it'll have saved
your info so you can book almost instantly. Unfortunatly, it doesn't appear you can save this info from one search session to another.
Walmart:
New Appointments: Haven't noticed a patern to when these are released yet. :(
Note: You need a login on their site just to search for something. The search is somewhat limited and cumbersome to use.
King Soopers💔:
New Appointments: Haven't yet noticed a patern for them.
Note: They have a bot that you communicate with to walk you though the process. Kinda cool!
Kroger:
New Appointments: Haven't yet noticed a patern for them.
Note: Same as King Soopers bascially.
Sam's Club:
New Appointments: Haven't yet noticed a patern for them.
Note: You might have to be a member, not sure.
Safeway:
New Appointments: Haven't yet noticed a patern for them.
Note: They let you pick which vaccine you want and offer up to a 50 mile range on the search.
The best bet for these is to be alerted to when new appointments pop up. If you are in CO you can follow this account: @CoVaxAlerts (huge thanks to (@nickblah)[https://twitter.com/nickblah]). They post when new appointments become available. It can be noisy and sometimes there's a lot of stuff that comes up for a few minutes later. What's really the most useful is that when a store launches new appointments you'll see a flood of stuff for that store. That's your trigger to go in and try to snatch one up!
For folks in other states, @nickblah also launched the Vaccine Spotter site, which is a killer resource. The tip about following @CoVaxAlerts still remains, when a store launches new appointments in one area they seem to do it in all areas at once.
For any other state-specific resources click into the folder for that state.
Good luck on finding something. Hopefully this helped somewhat. If you have any tips of your own please feel free to contribute.