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Two days of work and $ 50 were enough for Huge Ma to cause a small revolution in New York.
Ma, 31 years old, programmer at Airbnb, recently wanted to register his mother for a corona vaccination.
But that was more complicated than he thought.
Dozens of clinics and medical practices in the city offer appointments - but their phones are mostly busy and their websites are chaotic.
In addition, each portal requires its own account with user name, email address and password for booking.
And that's not all.
Then everything has to be monitored closely, in real time.
Because hundreds of vaccination appointments are often posted online at the same time - and are gone after just a few minutes.
Younger New Yorkers tell how they open 30 tabs in their browsers and keep updating them to get a slot for their parents or grandparents.
New York's public procurement system feels like a relic from the early days of the Internet, even though the city had months to develop.
Ma has therefore created something new: TurboVax - a kind of central vaccination hub for New York.
Using a robot program, the portal searches for free appointments at 53 different institutions and lists them clearly.
At the same time, the bot publishes all available slots on Twitter.
“The previous system is extremely complicated,” says Ma, “I thought it had to work better.” And it obviously works better.
Ma's Twitter page has 120,000 followers and is full of praise and thanks.
"Huge," writes one user, "stands for everything that is great about New York."
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Similar websites have now gone online elsewhere.
In Texas, California, Massachusetts and Florida, too, young computer scientists created portals almost overnight that are much easier to use than the state procurement systems.
In some regions of the United States, government sites are so disastrous that clinics and practices post appointments through Eventbrite - a platform where you can usually buy tickets to small concerts or local football tournaments.
For a long time, only bad news came from the United States.
In no other country in the world did so many people die of Covid-19.
Hardly any state leader has denied the dangers for as long as the elected ex-President Donald Trump.
Hardly anywhere did citizens resist masks and distance rules so much.
But that also belongs to America: talented doers who help others with their ingenuity, quickly and unbureaucratically.
It took Ma a weekend to program TurboVax.
“I was completely absorbed by the project,” he says, “a friend brought me food and fed my cat.” But the work was probably worth it.
Ma estimates his website helped tens of thousands of New Yorkers get vaccination appointments.
Overall, more than 20 percent of citizens in the metropolis received the first dose.
For comparison: in Germany it is less than eight percent.
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TurboVax is free, but Ma is asking users to make a donation to Welcome to Chinatown.
This is an organization that combats racism against Asian Americans and supports small, local companies.
So far, according to Ma, more than $ 50,000 has been raised.
In fact, the number of attacks by New York police has risen sharply in the past year.
One hears again and again of Chinese immigrants being insulted, beaten or stabbed.
The perpetrators often believe that their victims are spreading the virus in the United States.
“There is so much hatred,” says Ma, “I'm now afraid for my friends and family.” In protest, he took TurboVax offline at the end of February - but only for 48 hours.
Ma knows his mission is far from over.
"You can produce a billion vaccine doses a year"
Biontech's new plant in Marburg is about to start producing the corona vaccine.
WELT reporter Daniel Koop from Marburg will talk about when the vaccine can then be distributed in Germany.
Source: WORLD