"It's just a rationalization for selfish behavior."Ĭaplan said the ethics of vaccinating would be better served if sites had improved plans for how to utilize excess vaccine.
"Telling Grandma, 'Don't worry, even though you didn't get vaccinated, I did,' is not the right stance to take," Caplan said. That kind of thinking is "complete nonsense," said White, and Caplan agreed: All people should be offered the shot, because the goal should be to achieve herd immunity, which occurs when enough people become immune to a disease to make its spread unlikely. Some have argued that age or frontline status shouldn't even matter. Pulmonary and critical care physician Douglas White, director of the Program on Ethics and Decision Making in Critical Illness at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, agreed: "Every person who is young or healthy who's line-jumping is taking away the vaccine from someone more likely to die from COVID." "The perspective of 'I might as well do what I can to get the shot' pushes aside the high-risk people in nursing homes and prisons," said Art Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. When people buck the line, it means they're taking the vaccine out of someone else's arm, ethicists tell us. "Their ethics are, 'Why inject an 88-year-old who won't live long while I'll live another 50 years?' " Sacchetti said. Speaking on the day he vaccinated dozens of residents at a New Jersey site he declined to reveal, Sacchetti said that healthy 30-year-olds will lie about being sick to get vaccinated. The truth is, when you have a scarce resource like the vaccine, "people will scam to get it," said Al Sacchetti, director of clinical services in the emergency department of Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden. Such behavior is abhorrent, said Usama Bilal, a Drexel University epidemiologist, not only because it's unjust and immoral, but because "it builds mistrust and makes the jobs of health departments vaccinating us that much harder." We can blame this one on all kinds of people being ignorant." And let me be clear: It's not just whites. "'No! Wait till it's your time,' I tell them," Morales said. One city employee wanted me to get them the vaccine for their parents, just so they could travel. "Philly is small," Morales said, "and people know I have resources and contacts. In North Philadelphia, healthy people are constantly asking Charito Morales, a registered nurse and widely known neighborhood advocate, to connect them to someone with available vaccine. That "I'll do whatever it takes" ethos, Fernandez Lynch said, was epitomized by people like actress Lori Loughlin, who pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud in the nationwide scandal of rich parents trying to buy slots for their kids in big-time universities. We've long demonstrated ourselves to be "self-interested, rugged American capitalist individualists," noted Fernandez Lynch, cheating on taxes, doping out ways to get ahead, and grabbing up all the toilet paper in the grocery store at the first hint of trouble. And who's to stop hospitals, such as the one in Augusta, Maine, where officials dangled injections to big-time donors? States such as New York are threatening the licenses of physicians who participate in these schemes. So, it's no surprise, for example, that moneyed folks have offered tens of thousands of dollars to their doctors for a syringe dripping with life-sustaining liquid manufactured by Moderna or Pfizer, according to Fernandez Lynch. That means a lot of Americans are coveting a vaccination they may not see for a while. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show. And, of the 202 million designated as "priority," fewer than 30 million actually have been vaccinated so far, data from the U.S. That adds up to 202 million people, leaving an additional 131 million out of the count. Right now, according to AARP, the top three vaccine-priority groups are health-care personnel and long-term care facility residents (numbering 24 million people) frontline essential workers, as well as those ages 75 and older (49 million) and Americans who are ages 65 to 74, or ages 16 to 64 with high-risk conditions, as well as other essential workers (129 million).
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