You can’t ethically go ahead of the very people who made it possible for you to do so—at great personal risk

To me, it’s simple.

If you, like me, are not medically compromised and have been working from home over the past year while drawing your full salary, you have two options.

You can sit patiently until some institution calls you to get vaccinated.

Or, you can proactively organize with other people to make sure your government is distributing vaccines equitably to people who need them the most, especially those who don’t have many advocates—such as the millions of people who are living in congregate care settings, in prisons, or tent cities in the U.S., and the billions of people living in poor countries around the world.

But if you, like me, have been working from home and drawing your full salary in the pandemic, you cannot be trying to game the internet to get vaccinated before the postal carriers, hospital orderlies, cooks, food delivery people, Amazon package drivers, bus drivers, nurses, day care workers, doctors, grocery store shelf stockers, order fulfilment warehouse specialists, cashiers, people who’ve lost their jobs at your workplace while you’ve kept yours, people who never had a job or a home while you had both—and anyone else you may have banged a pot for at sunset in the early days of COVID.

In other words, if you’ve been working from home, you can’t ethically be line-jumping ahead of the very people who made it possible for you to work from home, at great personal risk.

At some level, “Prioritization vs speed is a false choice that ignores that we’re expecting to transition from vaccine scarcity to abundance over the course of the year (in the US, very different scenarios in different countries, some have abundance now, others have nothing w/ no end in sight),” as Lindsay Wiley, the director of the Health Law and Policy Program at American University Washington College of Law, wrote on Twitter. But those of us who have enjoyed the considerable prophylactic protection of working from home need to allow the prophylactic protection of a vaccine to first go to those who did not get to work from home—and especially for those who don’t work in traditional jobs because they are disabled, unhoused, elderly or locked up.

As Wiley wrote, “Prioritization is critical to reducing hospitalizations & deaths ASAP. The difference b/w getting vaxxed today vs. summer is massive for, eg, people w/ high-risk conditions whose work/family members’ work is high exposure. The rest of us can/should wait a few more months.”

It is unconscionable that a pandemic that is slaughtering people who are elderly, severely disabled, experiencing homelessness and/or incarcerated also requires them to come to the government by way of internet sign-up, QR codes and even two-factor cell-phone authentication.

This is an ableist trap. How can the government expect people who are illiterate, computer-illiterate, living on the streets and/or perhaps unable to use a computer because of their advanced age supposed to navigate such hoops?

In matters of law and war, the government is willing to come to us. When I turned 18, the U.S. government found me and told me (under threat of prosecution) to sign up for the Selective Service, so that I could be drafted in the event of a war. If any of us do not pay our taxes, you can be sure the U.S. government will find us, garnishing our wages if necessary—and if we break the law, police from our local government will arrest many of us quite quickly.

(Adapted from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/if-youve-been-working-from-home-please-wait-for-your-vaccine1/)

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