TurboVax is a web site and twitter feed that helps New Yorkers simply and easily find and register for COVID-19 vaccinations. New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang and Congressman Ritchie Torres honored TurboVax’s creator, Huge Ma, for his work to make it easy for thousands of New Yorkers to get COVID-19 vaccinations. Before TurboVax, people looking for a vaccination would need to monitor three government websites and periodically refresh them to find an available appointment. Ma experienced this himself trying to get an appointment for his mother. For $50 and two weekends of coding, he created the site, built on top of Google Docs (a really clever hack, in my opinion).
In addition, Ma is using his platform to educate people about anti-Asian hate and providing links to organizations raising money to support Asian Americans. Ma was previously honored by NY1 as New Yorker of the week.
When he isn’t guiding people to potentially life-saving vaccination appointments and fighting against hate, Ma is a software engineer at AirBnB. He recently got his first vaccine a few days ago, more than a month after starting the TurboVax service.
