About a week ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to our state's slow vaccine rollout by doing away with "tiers" and going to a purely age-based system. This is what lots of people have been recommending, but every decision like this leaves someone out in the cold:
“They act as if we do not exist. Or if we do, we’re expendable,” said [Ntombi] Peters, who uses multiple inhalers and daily medications to control her severe asthma and is on immunosuppressant drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, both of which put her at severe risk from COVID-19. “It’s very disheartening.”
....“Clearly, we are living in a culture that still sees people like me as disposable,” said Alice Wong, 46, a disabled activist in San Francisco, who created the hashtag #HighRiskCA in response to the change. “This is clearly erasure, this is eugenics, and I consider this a form of violence. It is a form of violence against the most marginalized communities.”
The problem, of course, is that someone has to make up rules about which disabilities qualify you for an early vaccination, and then someone else has to verify that the people applying really do have the disabilities they say they do. This is a huge amount of work that generates ever yet more blowback from whatever group finds itself on the wrong side of the line, and in the end it slows down the vaccine rollout.
This is the dilemma, and I can't pretend to have the answer. One thing I'll say, though, is that I think activists would have more success if they'd drop the pseudo-academic language of "erasure" and "eugenics" and "violence." It's none of that, and it accomplishes little except to make people less sympathetic to their cause. It's just a very difficult problem.
Pseudo-Academic is the language of activists. I get that universities tend to be incubators for activism, but I often wonder if the language is more directed at like-minded peers than any minds they'd hope to change. Also I wonder if my comment is also a form of violence...
It's also worth pointing out that the hyper-activist framing that often accompanies ADA discussions is largely a consequence of the fact that the state generally doesn't enforce the ADA outside of litigation (as opposed to approaches like building inspection or permitting, etc).
This has the effect of forcing many people with disabilities to become activists and say a lot of things that strike people who don't think a lot about the ADA as maximalist, because it's the only practical way for them to rectify outstanding problems.
That being said, WordPress comment functionality is the worst. No edits. No likes. Barely better than Coral...
Exactly. And the.color of draft comments hurts my eyes, making it more difficult to proof.
Who'd have thought anyone could miss Coral?!
I'm never quit sure what I'm typing....
OK, no difference there
Bring back disqus.
perfect description of coral
Alas poor Disqus, we never appreciated how good you were to us.
It is a very primitive user interface. The only real advantage over Coral is that the system isn’t governed by a mentally unstable algorithm with a hair trigger. Hopefully Kevin’s going to upgrade soon.
I don't think this logistics problem is all that difficult to sort through it is just being done in dumb ad-hoc ways and people are overly concerned with the unattainable goal of it being 100% fair. If we just asked *everyone* to sign up and provide age, height, weight, occupation, if they already had COVID and whether they have any of half a dozen medical conditions we could create a pretty good approximation of exposure risk and severity risk. From that we could assign them a priority. Sure some people will lie and therefore some might get a shot a few weeks earlier or later than might be optimal but who cares. You make it clear that they could be criminally prosecuted and move on. The real problem is that people do not know how long it will be before they get it. Telling people where in the queue they are and how quickly we are dealing with the queue would reduce the angst significantly. If someone knew for example that their priority was 39 out of 100 currently people with a priority below 18 was eligible, and that it was about 3 days for each priority to be processed they would probably accept it.
I feel bad for the disabled woman who can't get the shot. But what's going on is not eugenics. It's triage. In an emergency like we're in now, slowing down an already slow process by overcomplicating qualification will end up killing more people.
This, however, should change with vaccine supply. Once everyone is confident that there will be enough for everyone, then of the fights will become less fraught.
one upvote.
I like your solution. It has the extra advantage of requiring one to take the trouble to type something out.
By the way, one upvote.
Excellent comment, sir.
This. Just need to get everyone vaccinated as fast as possible and the issue goes away.
We are confident there will be enough for everyone. What we are worried about is the latency.
This is a dilemma. But someone who has severe asthma AND is immunosuppressed is likely a bad candidate for vaccines. Such people are those whom we try to protect via herd immunity.
absolute fairness is an impossibility absent sufficient vaccine supply and delivery systems. somebody has to go second. for what it's worth, i'm scheduled to get pfizered a second time on wednesday. i'm getting it because my wife is a healthcare worker who is exposed regularly to covid patients and her employer is offering the vaccine to family members. i'm also over 65 and i have a preexisting condition that weakens my immune system. there are certainly people out there who need the shot more than i do but how in a universe of millions of potential recipients do you weigh each against the other and come up with a system balances every single factor against each other? of course it would have helped had the previous administration actually thought through the problem months ago and developed a template of a solution that that each state could adapt and adopt to its own needs and have in hand to implement when the vaccines became available. we knew this day was coming.
“of course it would have helped had the previous administration actually thought through the problem months ago and developed a template of a solution that that each state could adapt and adopt to its own needs and have in hand to implement when the vaccines became available. we knew this day was coming.”
Nailed it. +1
The only way to mass vaccinate is to keep it simple. Thee can, and should be, caseworkers helping vulnerable populations---hopefully working in conjunction with their primary care physician. This is needed for the elderly, the invalid (still at home), as well as those with other medical conditions.
In other words, push as many people through as you can while you build up the infrastructure needed for outreach to the vulnerable.
'....“Clearly, we are living in a culture that still sees people like me as disposable,” said Alice Wong, 46, a disabled activist in San Francisco, who created the hashtag #HighRiskCA in response to the change. “This is clearly erasure, this is eugenics, and I consider this a form of violence. It is a form of violence against the most marginalized communities.”'
Okay, now I understand why some on the Left invite accusations of being unreasonable. This is absurd. Any high risk individual loses under this plan, so how could this possible be directed at the disabled community?
And what an idiotic use of the word "violence", in the era of the GOP directing ACTUAL violence against our government, our public officials, and anybody that disagrees with them.
This makes me think of draft boards. Can't local officials be appointed to go through vaccination requests and expedite certain cases according to agreed-upon criteria? Perfectly fair, maybe not, but more people might feel like they are getting some consideration.
But the problem with draft boards was the gazillion loopholes where the Senator's son gets an exception and all the African Americans and Hispanics were sent instead of the upper class white guys who had various schemes to avoid the draft (bone spurs).
I can't see how you'd avoid the institutional racism that is baked into such a scheme even with the best of intentions.
Okay, you'd hope they'd be fairer than draft boards of old. And I believe that nowadays, places with large minority populations would be even-handed with respect to race.
Agreed upon criteria? When I was growing up being employed or going to school and staying out of trouble was the criteria. Young men who were drinking or carrausing or were from the wong family ran a high risk of being drafted.
Yeah, those guys from the Wong family...
(I'll see myself out.)
Also, it's not true. The state didn't change the first tier. Disabilities still qualify.
But how will people know you're serious without histrionics?
Age is easy to verify.
Yeah, those guys from the Wong family...
(I'll see myself out.)
> someone else has to verify that the people applying really do have the disabilities they say they do
You don't actually have to do that. You could publish who ought to be getting vaccines at a point in time. People who are basically young and healthy aren't going to get butt-hurt that they aren't at the front of the line. Sure, you'll get some cheaters. But they exist even if you are verifying.