Should We Give the Vaccine to Anyone Who Wants It?
I have a friend with a serious autoimmune condition. She is at high risk of dying if she gets COVID-19.
But she can’t get the covid vaccine. Why not? Because she’s only 34 years old.
The New York Times recently published an interactive graphic to illustrate when each of us likely to become eligible for the vaccine. It’s simple and easy to read: a line of people snaking across your computer screen.
My friend with the autoimmune condition was near the back of that line.
While she waits, our federal and state governments are dropping the ball with vaccine distribution. Pfizer and Moderna have produced 17.3 million doses, but only 5.3 million shots have been given.
Of course, it’s not just governments to blame: 29% of healthcare workers have said that they will choose not get the vaccine.
Why are we keeping these vaccines doses locked away in a fridges and storehouses, when there are people out there who need them? Why are we so desperate to give out these vaccines in one particular order? Why the obsession with vaccinating exactly as we think is best?
What if we got rid of the classifications, the categorizations, the 1A / 1B / 2A etc etc? What if we just sent the vaccine to every CVS and Walgreens and Walmart in America and let people walk up and get it? What would happen?
Well, we can certainly be confident that more people would get the vaccine. If there were no restrictions, lots of middle-aged and young people would line up for it. Every single available dose would be used immediately.
But it’s true: without central control the vaccines might not be distributed in the order we prefer. Plenty of rich white men would get the vaccine before plenty of poor people of color. I understand the urge to avoid this.
Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, has said that he won’t get the vaccine until all black and brown people his age have access to it. He and others have implied that “access” includes an aggressive outreach campaign to be sure that minority groups are educated and informed about vaccine availability.
An outreach campaign is a great idea. But we shouldn’t pretend that it won’t take some time. And every day delayed means thousands of American deaths.
The logic behind equitable vaccine distribution is rooted in well-documented abuse of minority groups by the medical profession. Doctors (like me) have abused black and brown people for decades, whether it’s through the malignant neglect of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, or running experiments on their biological material without acknowledgement or compensation.
I can completely understand the urge to tightly control the distribution of the vaccine.
Here’s what we need to remember: a vaccine isn’t like penicillin, the antibiotic that was infamously denied to black men in the Tuskegee experiment. Penicillin only helps the person who takes it, but a vaccine can help people who will never take it.
For example: If I don’t get the vaccine but everyone I work with does, I’ll be protected. My co-workers will form an impenetrable wall of immunity around me. Why aren’t we considering this when it comes to vaccine distribution?
We should be getting as many people as possible vaccinated as quickly as possible, even if those people are younger, healthier, and whiter than we would like. If we quickly ramp up vaccination numbers, it will indirectly help people who are older, sicker, and less white.
But we’re not doing that. Instead, we are playing politics with the vaccine. We’re treating each dose like it’s a shot of penicillin. We’re behaving like a vaccinating a white person won’t ultimately benefit a person of color.
It’s easy to think that a vaccine only helps the person who gets the shot. But that’s not how vaccines work.
So maybe, just maybe, we should think about just giving the vaccine to anybody who wants it right away.
My friend with the autoimmune condition would certainly agree.
