NEW YORK — Dan Benamy is no doctor or public health expert, but that’s not stopping him from lending his talents to the fight against COVID-19. 

“I just want to get vaccines out of freezers and into people’s arms as fast as possible,” he said. 

After helping his grandparents get their vaccines using the city’s website to secure appointments, he thought there had to be an easier way. 

“The city has a very nice website, which lists all the different places that you can get a vaccination, but I’m sure you know that you have to go into each one to see if they have any appointments available,” he explained. “Then, you know, I can’t help but think, what if we could just pull this information into one place? Just make it easier for people to find vaccines.”

Benamy started moonlighting with a couple dozen other volunteers to create NYCVaccineList.com. It’s a website that collects appointment information from each individual facility and publishes the available times on this single webpage. 

The webpage now scrapes information from 46 websites and is adding more day by day. 

“We want to make this as accessible to many people as possible,” Benamy explained. 

City Councilman Mark Levine had proposed that the city create just such a site, modeled after Kayak.com, which scans airline reservation systems to provide a list of the cheapest available flights.

Now, Levine is applauding the creation of NYCVaccineList.com, calling it on Twitter the "hottest website in NYC now."

Levine also notes that the site usually shows zero vaccination appointments available, a reminder of what he said is "the biggest problem we are facing: lack of vaccine supply."

The site is refreshed with new appointment information every couple of minutes. Wednesday evening, one appointment was shown in the Bronx, but it was gone later in the night. 

"Don’t hold me to this, but to some degree, the faster I can take his website down, the better. Because that means we vaccinate everybody," Benamy said.