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As debate rages on who should be next to receive the coronavirus vaccine, some experts say essential workers should come first over the elderly.
The United States began inoculating Americans with the Pfizer vaccine this week, and the Food and Drug Administration is working to clear the Moderna coronavirus vaccine. But with a limited supply, no vaccine is expected to be widely available until at least spring 2021.
Healthcare workers and long-time nursing home residents are the first to receive the vaccine, but experts have yet to determine who should be next. The Centers for Disease Control will issue a recommendation soon, after an independent panel of medical experts advising the CDC votes on who to propose for “Phase 1b.”
At a committee meeting last month, all voting members voted to put essential workers ahead of those 65 and over and those with health conditions that place them in a high-risk category.
The committee usually relies on science to inform decisions, but this time social justice concerns were also raised.
Harald Schmidt, an expert in health ethics and policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that essential workers should take priority over older adults because “older populations are whiter.”
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“Society is structured to allow them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
The claim led to a reaction on social media.
“It’s horrible,” Commentary editor-in-chief Noah Rothman wrote on Twitter. “It’s the kind of impartial empiricism we expect. Trust the science.”
“I warned you against social justice,” he added.
“Plus, he’s wrong: Asians and Hispanics have the longest life expectancy in the United States,” wrote Christina Hoff Sommers. According to data compiled by CDC and NIH worldlifeexpectancy.com, Asian Americans have a life expectancy of 86.67 and Hispanic Americans have a life expectancy of 82.89. White Americans have a life expectancy of 79.12.
“It’s sick,” radio host Jason Rantz wrote quote from Schmidt.
Schmidt denied taking a “racial-only approach” and emphasized his call for the CDC committee to include its own index of social vulnerability. The index takes into account 15 factors, such as poverty, lack of access to vehicles and overcrowded housing.
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“The fundamental point is this: among the population 65 and over, many can live socially remote safely and with relatively less inconvenience until they receive a vaccine,” Schmidt told Fox News . “But many more of the essential workers don’t have that option, especially the frontline workers. For them, getting a vaccine sooner can literally be of existential importance.”
Committee members take ethical considerations to heart, whatever their interpretation.
“For me, the question of ethics is very important, very important for this country,” said at the time Dr. Peter Szliyagyi, member of the committee and professor of pediatrics at the University of California at Los Angeles. “And [ethics] clearly favors the essential worker group due to the high proportion of minority, low-income and low-educated workers among essential workers. “
But such claims go against the highest authorities in medicine.
Dr Robert Redfield, CDC director and the nation’s top public health official, reminded the committee in a statement earlier this month that it anticipates “future recommendations which, based on vaccine availability, demonstrate that as a nation we also put the elderly first ”.
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After committee votes, Redfield will decide whether or not to accept his recommendation as official CDC direction. Ultimately, it will be up to state and local health officials to follow CDC guidelines.
“If your goal is to maximize the preservation of human life, then you would skew the vaccine towards older Americans,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner recently. “If your goal is to reduce the infection rate, you will prioritize essential workers. So it depends on the impact you are trying to achieve.”
But the essential work category makes up 70 percent of the US workforce, and has a less clear line of which “essential” workers can be considered “frontline” employees.
Another infectious disease epidemiologist told The New York Times that teachers shouldn’t even be included in the next essential job category for the vaccine because they “have middle class salaries, very often are white people and have university degrees “.
“Sure, they should be treated better, but they’re not among the most abused workers,” said Marc Lipsitch, of the TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard.
But a senior economist at the Institute for Economic Policy pointed out that essential workers, disproportionately in the minority, need teachers to be immunized to send their children back to school.
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“When you talk about a disproportionate impact and you worry about getting people back into the workforce, many are mothers, and they will have a harder time if their children have no reliable place to go.” , she said. “And if you generally think of people who have jobs where they can’t telecommute, they’re disproportionately black and brown. They will have more difficulty when child care is an issue.
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