Hi, I'm Dan Permanak and welcome to Axios Recap. Today is Friday, February 19th. Power is still down for

hundreds of thousands in Texas. Gas prices keep going up and we're talking about an unexpected player

in the effort to vaccinate America. Florida's Brevard County sits on the state's mid-eastern coast,

home to such things as Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. But despite all of those rocket

scientists, no one in Brevard thought to create a website or an app for setting up COVID-19

vaccination appointments, a job that the state left up to local county

and municipal governments. Instead, Brevard figured it would just use a telephone system.

Within days, though, the county realized that it's obviously bad idea was a bad idea, so it scrambled,

quickly deciding to replace the phones with Eventbright, which is best known

as the tech platform for buying tickets to concerts and other live events.

The immediate results were mixed.

Yes, people got appointments, which is the most important thing.

But there were also some vaccination events set up that weren't real.

Eventbrite, meanwhile, wasn't part of the planning.

In fact, it didn't even really seem to know it was being used until newspaper reports,

including of some of those fake events, which it turned out seemed to be because of user error,

not because of fraud. Nearly two months and lots of other system failures and frustrations later,

and Eventbrite has now been adopted,

not just by other Florida counties, but by governments in dozens of other states.

Why it matters is this episode reflects how poorly state and local governments plan for a massive

logistical exercise they knew was coming for months, and how some off-the-shelf solutions had been sitting there all

along. So we wanted to speak to Julia Hartz, Eventbrite's co-founder and CEO, who were joined by now.

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