Samuel Keusch, 12, has a not-so-secret skill: lightning-fast fingers. An avid video-gamer, he is often the first player to press a button when some thrilling gameplay calls for it.
That skill — which let’s face it, many kids havedeveloped during quarantine— has helped make a difference in people’s lives in a very big way: Through his website,Vaccine Helper, Sam has helped more than 1,100 people in New York get their Covid-19 vaccine appointments.
Sam got inspired when hisgrandparents, who are in their late 60s and early 70s, became eligible for the vaccine — and yet, like so many New Yorkers, they struggled to figure out exactlyhowto do it.
Since New York state began offering vaccines this winter, many have complained that the system is笨重and difficult to navigate, withtoo many portalsand websites and specific locations. Signing up also requires a certain amount of free time and web-savviness that many who are older, or are more busy working frontline jobs, or have less stable internet access, struggle with.
But young Sam has all these things — he goes to Zoom school and is, as we’ve established, a gaming whiz, and because of these two things, he has a pretty good internet setup. He and his father managed to find appointments for his grandparents fast — and it made Sam think that he could easily offer the same services for other people.
所以在with his father, David, a real-estate lawyer by trade but a technology aficionado, and a couple of David’s friends, Sam decided to make finding vaccines for others his bar mitzvah project. At first, the project was centered around their synagogue, Beth El Synagogue Center in New Rochelle, which has about 1,000 congregants.
“My neighbor is aHolocaust survivorand she sent me a bunch of her friends and we’ve been helping them and they’re all so great to help because they’re all really nice and they send us really nice emails,” Sam told me this past Friday during a phone interview.
“我们最初认为这将是一种像一种寺庙项目，”萨姆·萨姆的大卫说。“我们会帮助寺庙和周围的人，也许是一些亲密的朋友。此时95％，甚至更多的人正在注册，我们不知道他们是谁。他们被其他人提到了。坦率地说，如果萨姆愿意帮助他们，你知道，我们不会说我们不认识你。他们需要帮助。所以，我们一直在帮助。“
The project centers around a simple Google Form, in which Sam solicits from each applicant the necessary information so he can book their vaccine appointments. What’s more, Sam also makes sure to book these appointments during times and in locations that are convenient for these individuals. (The most popular locations so far have been in威彻斯特, the Javits Center in Manhattan, Jones Beach, and Stony Brook.)
最近，疫苗助手真的一直在汽油：“一开始，我们很高兴每10分钟预约一次。现在，我们一天左右，我们一直在平均，现在是75个，“萨姆说。
Sam knows exactly how important these vaccines are: “My mom is a doctor. She’s helped with Covid cases. And she already got her both her shots a while ago. It’s a lot better now that we know she safer, being with Covid patients.”
He doesn’t ask for anything in return for making these appointments, though if people feel like they want to pay him back, his website suggests a donation toFeeding Westchesteror to在新罗谢尔的贝丝州犹太教堂中心。看到这些捐款下他的名字是深深地搬到山姆：“他们让我觉得这是一个伟大的项目，”他说。
Of course, Sam isn’t the only kid out there using his skills and free time to help people get vaccines. In Chicago, 14-year-oldBenjamin Kagan（心爱的Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg的侄子）正在帮助人们获得疫苗约会，也在谷歌表格的帮助下。另一个13岁的芝加哥居民，Eli Coustan, is also helping people book vaccine appointments through his website,ILVaccine.org.
These projects are literal life-savers for so many people, and they also highlight howdifficultthese decentralized vaccine registration systems are to navigate — an issue that, so far, doesn’t seem to have a national, systemic solution.
Luckily, while Sam’s bar mitzvah in May is fast approaching, he has no plan to stop working on Vaccine Helper any time soon: “I’m planning to do this for a while,” he said. “I mean, until people don’t need appointments. I’m trying to get as many people as we can.”
Image courtesy of David Keusch
