2024-07-24
2 小时 1 分钟Today, I'm chatting with Patrick McKenzie.
He is known for many things.
On the internet, he's known as patio 11.
Most recently, he ran vaccinate CA, which probably saved on the order of high four figure number of lives during COVID.
He also writes an excellent newsletter called bits about money.
Patrick, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks very much for having me.
So what was Vaccinate CA?
In early 2021, we were quite concerned that people were making 20, 40, 60 phone calls to try to find a pharmacy that actually had a dose of the COVID vaccine in stock and could successfully deliver it to them.
I tweeted out randomly, you know, It's insane that every person or every caregiver is attempting to contact every medical provider in the state of California to find doses of the vaccine.
California clearly has at least one person capable of building a website where we can centralize that information and send everybody to the website.
If you build that website, I'll pay for the server bill or whatever.
And Carl Yang took up the gauntlet and invited 10 of his best friends and said basically, all right, get in guys, we're going to open source the availability of the vaccine in California by tomorrow morning.
This is at like 10 p.m.
at night California time.
And so I lurked on into the discord where of course all medical infrastructure is built and gave a few pointers on, you know, making scaled calling operations.
And then one thing led to another and ended up becoming the CEO of this initiative.
At the start, it was just like this hackathon project of a bunch of random tech people who thought, hey, we can build a website, make some phone calls, maybe help some people find the vaccine at the margin.
And it grew a little bit from there.
We ended up becoming essentially the public-private partnership, which was the clearinghouse for vaccine location information for the United States of America.