Find faster vaccine appointments in Québec 📆⏩💉

The light at the end of the tunnel is closer than you think! The current wait time for vaccine appointments in Québec can be as much as a few weeks — with the official government site showing many sites with no available appointments.

But it’s possible to get a shot today or tomorrow — if you can find a last-minute opening.

Good news! You no longer have to hit “refresh” 5,000 times to find one of those coveted doses: as a weekend coding project, we found a way to monitor ALL the last-minute vaccine appointments (including last-minute cancellations❗️) across Québec.

Now we’re sharing this information with you so no vaccines go to waste. And so you can get your vaccine faster! 🥳👯‍♀️🎺

Simply go to Vaccélérateur on Twitter to find a last-minute appointment for you, or someone you know, by following the bot for your region.

Be sure to turn on Twitter notifications 🔔 so you can book right away.

• The bot automatically checks for last-minute appointments in your region.
• It tweets it out as soon as an appointment becomes available.
• Click the link in the tweet, book your appointment, you’re good to go!
• Make sure you’re eligible before you book (aka you fit the age criteria, or other priority status).
• Make sure you’re a resident of the right area (if the tweet is for Montréal and you live in Bas-Saint-Laurent, you won’t be able to book the appointment. They’ll ask for your postal code).

Our Twitter bot will also tweet when new groups are eligible for vaccines (if you want to get reminded when your age group can book appointments, just follow Vaccélérateur or check the official site).

Now, instead of pointlessly refreshing vaccine calendars for random clinics — hoping for a lucky, earlier dose to appear — you can easily find appointments as soon as they become available. As more doses come online, we’ll be updating the Vaccélérateur bot to make sure it’s as useful as possible.

Need directions to your appointment?

How convenient! For our day job, we run Transit: an app for public transportation, built in Montréal. Now every time you open our app anywhere in the province of Québec, you can get quick directions to vaccine clinics that have appointments available in the next 7 days — thanks to data from our friends at Vaxstat, a volunteer project that makes it easier to get vaccinated.

We also show vaccination clinics in the app in Alberta, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and several other places — wherever vaccination locations are published in an open data format.

Good luck getting your doses! We can’t wait to see all your happy smiles.

It’s been a while. 😷👉💉🤩

Are you an intrepid reporter with a question? Drop us a line.

PS: we’re hiring a data scientist, iOS developer, web dev, and more. (Know someone?)