For the next few days, Salzano was hunched over her phone, scouring dozens of Kroger, CVS, and Walgreens sites for any appointment near her mom’s home in Columbus, the state capital. At midnight, when a slew of new appointment times would get released, she’d dash to the family computer and try again.

The result was always the same: no availability.

“I was kind of like, this is never going to happen,” Salzano told The Daily Beast.

But then her dad suggested she might have better luck if she looked in the parts of Ohio where denial about COVID’s risks was high—and demand for vaccines was low.

“So I just googled ‘Trump landslides in Ohio,’” then I looked at the nearest county and the biggest city in that county, and I found an appointment,” Salzano told The Daily Beast.