Just Vaccinate Whoever Wants It
By 
Dayen put into words something I’ve been thinking for the last week or so.
The negative outcome of “jumping the line” is one less person among 330 million who can take up a hospital bed. The benefit of getting the damn shots out far outstrips any other consequence
— David Dayen (@ddayen) January 1, 2021
Look, I’d like to live in a nation where we could rationally and quickly vaccinate people, beginning with the most vulnerable.
I do not live in that nation. I live in the United States.
And while Biden will be helpful here, the deeper problem is that the nation’s entire infrastructure is slowly crumbling and that includes the ability to do something like vaccinate a population. He and his appointees can only do so much.
If the top priority should be vaccinating the most vulnerable, and I agree that it should be, the secondary priority should be vaccinating as many people as fast as possible. And the second is far more achievable at this time. If you let everyone who wants a vaccine sign up for one at the first available opportunity without trying to pick and choose who to give it to, you do a couple things. First, you get a lot more vaccine in the population more quickly. I may not be in a high risk group, but I might see people who are. Second, it builds up public confidence in the vaccine as nervous people know others who have had it.
Now, there are problems with this idea, no question. We actually should be prioritizing the most vulnerable. We just are too incompetent a nation to do it. This would likely also replicate the same medical inequality we see throughout our nation.
It’s a far from ideal situation here. But the one thing worse than all of this is not vaccinating people at all, to the point that vaccines might go bad while we dither and figure out how to do this. Based on simply having to live in the nation that we actually have rather than the nation we wished we had, I think moving toward vaccinating whoever wants one might be the least bad choice here.