Laguna Beach woman creates Facebook group to help OC residents navigate vaccine process

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. (KABC) -- Laguna Beach resident Teri Perlstein is the woman behind a new Facebook group called VaxMe OC, which is meant to help provide information on COVID-19 vaccine eligibility and availability.

"Every time I get somebody vaccinated, I feel like I won the lottery, so it's really worth it," she said.

She created the group two months ago when she noticed a lot of confusion around appointments.

"I saw a lot of frustrated people asking questions and people giving random answers, and it all buried in with other things. So, I thought, this needs to be taken to its own place," she said.

Since then, it's grown to more than 5,000 thousand members, which has Teri treating it like a part-time job, looking for updates three times a day.

"First thing I do is I go to my computer before making coffee, and I check nine of the major sites giving vaccinations and post whether or not they have appointments available," she said.

Her biggest piece of advice is to keep checking eligibility, register on all the necessary vaccine appointment sites and be aggressive.

"Once they're eligible, they need to be diligent, they need to be checking at 6 o'clock in the morning for appointments, they can go to the top of my page where I have nine different places with the links to them," said Perlstein.

Although it's a lot of hard work, she says it all pays off when she knows people are getting the help they need.

"I get notes from people all day long who are just so happy and thankful and grateful and it makes my day," she said.

While it's rewarding every single time her page helps people get vaccinated, she was really excited recently when she said someone was able to help 150 people get vaccinated based on the information provided on her page.