Patrick McKenzie - How a Discord Server Saved Thousands of Lives
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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Dwarkesh: 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: Patrick, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for having me.
Dwarkesh: So what was Vaccinate CA?
Patrick: In early 2021, we were quite concerned that, people were making 20, 40, 60 phone calls 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 you can centralize that information and send everybody to the website. If you build that website, I'll pay for the
Get in, guys. We're gonna o open source the availability of, the vaccine in California by tomorrow morning. It's at, like, 10 PM 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 I ended up, becoming this 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. That felt a little weird at the time and continues to.
Dwarkesh: Okay. So the obvious question is why was this something that people randomly picked up on a Discord server? Why wasn't this an initiative either by an entity delegated by the government or by, you know, the White House has, or the pharmacies have a website or you're gonna sign up for an appointment? Oh,
Patrick: there are so many reasons and a whole lot of finger pointing going on. One of the things was was that there were almost no actors anywhere in the system who said, yes. This is definitely my responsibility. Various parts of our, nation's institutions, county level public art depart public health departments, governors' offices, the presidency, 2 presidencies over this interval, which will become relevant. You know, they all said, well, I have a narrow part to play in this, but someone else has to do the hard yards of actually, like, putting shots in people's arms.
And someone else is clearly, like, dealing with the logistics problem. Right? And it the ball was just dropped comprehensively, and, no one at the time really had a plan for picking it up, or, didn't feel like it was incentive compatible for them specifically to pick it up right now. Would it be great if someone could do this, but just not me?
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