Stanford Medical Residents Protest Hospital Vaccination Order

Resident doctors flooded Stanford hospital on Friday in protest after executives arrived there would have used a flawed algorithm to sort out its first wave of vaccinations and overwhelmingly left out caregivers working on the front lines of the covid-19 pandemic.

Of the approximately 1,300 residents of Stanford Medicine, only seven were chosen to be among the first 5,000 employees online to receive the new Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, ProPublica Reports. A letter to hospital officials that has been signed by residents and reviewed by Ars Technica claimed that senior doctors and senior professors who had been working remotely since March were on the list when only 0.5% of residents were screened for vaccination. And just to add insult to injury, the move came the same week residents were asked to volunteer for shifts in the intensive care unit – where they would likely work in close contact with covid-19 patients – as the hospital braced for a spike in cases, apparently due to the holiday season.

In an interview with ProPublica, Sarah Johnson, an OB-GYN resident who has delivered babies to patients with covid-19, called it a “drop in the bucket” for already exhausted and neglected hospital staff after regularly risked exposure during an international health crisis.

“The residents face the patients, we were the ones who were asked to intubate, but some people who faced us at home are vaccinated before us,” she told the outlet. “It’s the last straw to say, ‘We don’t really care about you.'”

Residents called on Stanford executives to “vaccinate the front line” as protests erupted inside and outside the hospital on Friday. Dozens of signs carried messages like “First in the room. Back of the line ”and“ #Healthcare hero. The support is zero. “

Stanford has developed an algorithm to “ethically” choose who among its staff would be the first to get the vaccine, but the design flaws apparently put residents at a disadvantage from the start. Graduates of medical schools are usually required to complete some sort of residency program before they can obtain their medical license where they work under the supervision of other doctors. As the position is temporary, residents do not have an assigned “location” to “log into the calculus” that determines who would be the first to receive the vaccine, one chief resident explained in an email to his peers. And they tend to be younger, he added, which also makes them less likely to make the cut, probably because older people have a higher risk develop serious complications from the virus.

Stanford Medicine the executives have since admitted to screwing up:

“We take full responsibility for errors in the execution of our vaccine distribution plan,” reads one press. statement sent by e-mail to Gizmodo. “Our intention was to deploy an ethical and fair plan for the entire organization, and there were flaws in that plan that we are actively trying to fix ”.

In an email to the staff reviewed by NPRStanford executives and deans have apologized and said they discovered “significant gaps” in developing a vaccine distribution plan. They went on to say that they are working to correct the plan and that they expect to be able to vaccinate “a substantial segment of our community” hopefully as early as next week once a larger shipment of vaccine arrives.

Residents are also asking for nurses, therapists, janitors, food service workers and other essential staff that the algorithm may have overlooked to be included among those considered for the first round of vaccinations, NBC reports. . And, ideally, they would like to sit at the table while the hospital revises its plan.

I can’t even begin to imagine the frustration these residents must feel, risking their health and safety every day just to be swept aside when relief is finally in sight. And not to interfere with their struggle, but the fact that their age puts them at a disadvantage to receive the hit vaccine way too close to home as an immunocompromised person most of their adult life. Hopefully Stanford can fix things soon, as this pandemic has been going on for almost a year now and frontline workers have more than deserved the right not to stand in line.

Updated: 12/18/2020, 9:16 p.m. ET: Added statement from Stanford Medicine.