On Wednesday, under increasing criticism for the state’s slow vaccine rollout, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced that all Californians 65 and older will be eligible for the shot.

But if you were a Californian who wanted to find more information about where to get that shot for yourself or your loved one, you would’ve been out of luck. While the state’s website has been updated to say that individuals 65 or older are eligible, there are no tools to find a nearby location where vaccines are available. The state’s official FAQ answers the question, “How can I get the Covid-19 vaccine?” with, “Most Californians will be vaccinated at community vaccination sites, doctor’s offices, clinics, or pharmacies” — no links, no instructions about how to find one near you.

So, fed-up Californians are taking matters into their own hands: they’re crowdsourcing it. In the last two days, an effort has sprung up to report on where shots are available to the elderly. Volunteers have set up a spreadsheet with a simple premise: One person can call each location every day and ask if vaccines are available, and then publish the information for everyone to see. (There’s a way to submit updates and corrections, too.) Once the team is confident in their two-day-old system, they’ll open up crowdsourcing and reporting, soliciting more help and more publicity so it can reach more Californians.

The crowdsourced list of where Covid-19 vaccines are available, and to whom, is a microcosm of both everything good and everything utterly broken about the United States’coronavirus response.

Throughout the pandemic, national coordination has been lacking, causing public health tasks to fall to states and counties that vary dramatically in their preparedness to take them on. Coordination tasks that should be the business of government.

Read the full article about how Californians are resorting to crowdsourcing to get their COVID-19 vaccine by Kelsey Piper at Vox.