To get one of FEMA’s surplus COVID-19 vaccine doses in Philly, better know the secret passphrase

Everyone knows the wheels on the bus go round and round, but until recently it was a closely guarded secret that reciting the children’s song lyric could get you vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

The pass phrase “the wheels on the bus” has expired, city officials said, but it’s an example of the codes the city is giving people to ensure unused doses at the FEMA-run mass vaccination site don’t go to waste, go to eligible people, and to prevent massive lines forming for a few doses, said James Garrow, a spokesperson for the city health department. A vial of vaccine can’t be restored after a needle has been plunged into it once, and any doses remaining in a vial have to be used by the end of the day.

As with the unrestricted links that allowed an untold number of people presently ineligible for vaccination to get appointments at the FEMA clinic, the pass phrases can be shared, allowing people to use the magic words to get precious vaccine before it’s their turn. Again, the city is relying on people’s judgment to keep vaccine access limited.

Staff at the Convention Center weren’t checking to ensure the people using the pass phrases are truly entitled to them, Garrow said, but misuse is far less of a problem than it was with unrestricted links.

Earlier this week, the company responsible for the vaccine registration software made a fix so that links are valid for one use only, rather than permitting hundreds of illicit sign-ups.

Improper pass phrase sharing is “not as big an issue we feel as the shared links,” Garrow said. “This is going out to just a few hundred per day, unless someone is just walking down the street shouting out the password. We think it’s a relatively small number of people.”

Being more rigorous about checking who is using the pass phrases, he said, would be complicated because names of those given the last-minute invitations are coming in throughout the day from a number of different callers. “Though that may happen in the future as we improve our processes,” he added.

The opportunity to snag last-minute doses at the Convention Center is likely to disappear, he said, when providers there shift to administering scheduled second doses, which is expected in less than two weeks.

The city establishes 7,500 daily time slots for 6,000 doses at the Convention Center, Garrow said, intentionally overscheduling to compensate for people who skip their appointment. Still, there are typically a few hundred doses that could go unused each day, and clinic staff typically can estimate how the day is going. The city can’t wait until the end of the day to start sending out last-minute invitations for so-called “just-in-time” appointments, Garrow said, so people have time to get to the clinic.

“They can come at any point during the day that they have a just-in-time appointment,” Garrow said.

For the past week, the city has used the just-in-time appointments to improve vaccine access in underserved neighborhoods, Garrow said, by reaching out to community organizations that can quickly contact eligible people, whether or not they preregistered with the city for vaccination.

The city has come up with pass phrases from different sources, Garrow said, and “the wheels on the bus” wasn’t chosen at random.

“That day’s was because we were including child-care providers who hadn’t been vaccinated through CHOP,” he said. “We wanted something memorable for them.”