One part Christmas miracle, another part an extraordinary feat of the liberal values of science and capitalism, Pfizer has produced a coronavirus vaccine that, according to data thus far, is both perfectly safe and more than 90% effective. If it pans out, the “new normal” will prove nothing but a shameful blip on the American story.
But even if the Pfizer vaccine proves as promising as is hoped for, the nation faces one monumental obstacle: development and distributing the vaccine.
By the end of the year, Pfizer is aiming to have 50 million vaccines — that is, enough for 25 million people because the inoculation requires two doses. The United States has nearly 330 million people, so you do the math.
What we need as a country (not just to limit the number of tragedies added to our 239,000 deaths, but also to salvage an economy that’s exacerbating income inequality, especially among women and people of color) is to make sure that our vaccine distribution mirrors the opposite of our testing failure from the spring.
It may seem like a decade ago, but recall that while most ordinary people struggled to get tests, celebrities from Tom Hanks to the entire Utah Jazz NBA team were able to get them on demand. Because of the government lockdowns across the country, the ramifications of the testing catastrophe not only cost lives but were an obstacle to getting the economy moving. But the vaccine will be different.
For starters, President Trump has already committed nearly $2 billion of taxpayer funds to pay for 100 million vaccines to provide to the public for free. If Pfizer is caught in any way skirting around the agreement and offering vaccine reserves to the wealthy with jacked-up prices, there will be legal hell to pay.
But more importantly, this lockdown has had a wildly disparate impact on the public. My physician father has spent nearly a year now putting himself at risk of contracting the coronavirus while treating patients. My mother has been doing her full-time job of running his medical practice while helping my little sister “distance learn.” And they’re some of the lucky ones.
Across the country, we have single mothers who are forced to choose whether they will put themselves at risk for the virus while working or living on savings and unemployment because they have to teach their kids while unionized teachers refuse to. Our frontline workers in factories and grocery stores have worked in grueling conditions, some for more hours but not more pay. Entire industries rendered inoperable by government rules and spooked consumers have been forced to lay off millions. All of these people deserve priority access to the virus. My friends and I do not.
Don’t get me wrong. I think everyone in the country should take the vaccine eventually, and the anti-vaccination language that was indulged by Sen. Kamala Harris during the campaign was reprehensible. But there’s the issue of to whom distributing it first will save the most lives and the economy.
I have the immense privilege of having a job that I can do almost entirely at home. I live in a walkable city with easy access to deliver everything from groceries to medicine. I was blessed to have been born too early to still be in school and too late to yet have children. The last 10 months haven’t been easy on anyone, but what has constituted inconveniences ranging from annoying to depressing for an entire generation of urban millennials happy to work from a MacBook in a studio ranges from outright poverty and hunger-inducing to being literally fatal for millions of parents and frontline workers.
In any other circumstance, I’d be fine with the market doing its thing. After all, in normal economies, the basic laws of supply and demand would use price-gouging as a signal to induce more production. But the federal government already had the agreement with Pfizer via Operation Warp Speed, and if your No. 1 interest is maximizing your 401(k), that means getting the workers who lost their jobs because of shutdowns back to work as soon as possible and dealing with a few extra months of UberEats and home movie nights so we can reopen every school in America.
The order of vaccine distribution should go something like this: doctors and frontline workers, people receiving unemployment, those under a certain income bracket or with pre-existing conditions, parents, and then, finally, urban millennials who are not yet parents and able to work from home.
Actually, I stand corrected; the celebrities should be last — because they were the ones who unleashed the cancer of anti-vaccination onto the country. So, screw those guys.
