It is not at all surprising that people are already involved in COVID-19 vaccine scams. The big surprise is that they brag about it. So, if we’re asking, “Do people have any shame?” The answer I would like to offer is “Apparently not.” 
Bragging Rights
As with many “line cutters,” it isn’t a matter of what you know, but whom. In Los Angeles, California, a 33-year-old woman with a fondness for Facebook (we’ll get right into that) worked her connections to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The woman’s husband has a relative who is an executive at Redlands Community Hospital in Los Angeles. The hospital boasts a staff of 300 physicians and 1,800 workers. The woman was not a frontline worker, but someone who works at Disney. She was so gleeful at getting the vaccine that she took to Facebook on December 20, 2020.
“When I woke up this morning, I didn’t think I would be getting the COVID-19 vaccine today. But here we are. I’m so very happy.”
If her blatant abuse of the system wasn’t bad enough, she followed it up with, “Science is basically my religion, so this was a big deal for me.” She also had the temerity to post a vaccination card from the hospital.
Expiration?
Allegedly, the vaccine doses were about to expire and it would have rendered them unusable. The hospital claimed that they had “administered its allotment of Pfizer vaccines to its frontline physicians, healthcare workers and support staff per California Department of Public Health guidelines.”
Furthermore, they explained that “After physicians and staff who expressed interest in the vaccine were administered, there were several doses left. Because the reconstituted Pfizer vaccine must be used within hours or be disposed of, several doses were administered to non-front line healthcare workers so that valuable vaccine would not be thrown away.”
It is an established fact that the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine must be kept extremely cold and must be given soon after it thaws.
And I get all of that but there are several ethical questions that need to be posed.
Los Angeles has been very hard hit by the pandemic. Millions of residents live within a few miles of Redlands Community Hospital.
Assuming that doses were delivered to all 2,100 hospital employees who wanted them (which is something that I would quickly question), were there no other essential workers who might have received benefit?
How about elderly or immune compromised patients (with obvious permissions) or EMS personnel or nursing home staff in the area? Why, instead, did a 33-year-old Disney employee who was related to a healthcare executive qualify for the vaccine? I can’t help but wonder who else qualified for the surreptitiously administered vaccines?
My belief is that “a present” in terms of extra doses landed it the lap of Redlands Community Hospital and the staff, instead of an ethical distribution, opted for an entitled distribution.
NBC Report
On December 18, 2020, Stanford University Medical Center Hospital had a staged walkout. Frontline workers were angry that there was a “vaccine priority” for senior doctors who had no face-to-face contact with patients while medical residents were forced to the end of the line. In fact, only 7 residents out of 1,349 residents were selected to receive the first vaccinations. The hospital claimed it was a computer error.
From an ethical point-of-view I wonder if any “human” within the prestigious Stanford University Medical Center Hospital had wondered why the distribution was so skewed?
There are ethical screens that appear to be missing in the decision making of the COVID vaccine distribution. It is not so much the “order” that follows CDC guidelines, it is what happens within that framework. How does a 33-year-old who is not even associated with the hospital leap-frog over others who are more deserving? Why were residents with constant patient contact placed behind “senior” physicians with no patient contact?
Unless ethics guides common sense, what will the future of medicine look like?
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