Muskegon Sun

While the increasing availability of the COVID-19 vaccine brings a breath of relief for many who would like to reopen their businesses, return to work or send their children back to school, others are asking questions about the ethics behind the prioritization of the vaccine's distribution across different professions and demographics.

One of those people is a medical ethicist and assistant professor of philosophy at Grand Valley State University, Jeffrey Byrnes. Byrnes said the impact of the scarce supply of the vaccine should be maximized until there is enough of it to go around.

"Given that we cannot vaccinate everyone at once, how do we allocate the first doses to get maximal benefit to all the people?" Byrnes said, according to Bridge Michigan. Byrnes is advising Kent County public health officials to promote justice, equity and a sense of public trust when making these decisions. "How do we administer this vaccine in a way that both treats people fairly and ensures an equitable result?"

He said the public should be informed about what how officials are prioritizing the vaccine. 

Byrnes explained that the vaccine would, of course, be offered to everyone if there were enough to distribute it all simultaneously. Instead, officials must make difficult decisions about the order of distribution across different "essential" professions, such as teachers, power line workers and snowplow drivers, just to name a few. 

"Comparing the secondary benefits to the community of vaccinating a teacher and a power line worker cannot be undertaken in the realm of ethics alone," Byrnes told Bridge Michigan. "It requires input from experts in fields like statistics or data science who can model likely benefit models. These are difficult questions that have local variation. Firefighters might have a greater utility in central California than they do in southern Louisiana."

Byrnes acknowledged the question of why the staff of homeless shelters and prisons are prioritized in Phase 1B of the vaccine distribution, while the residents of those facilities -- inmates and the homeless -- are not. 

"From my understanding of epidemiology, there is reason to think that vaccinating the staff is an effective use of a small number of vaccines -- largely because they have contact with people on the outside and would likely bring the virus in with them," Byrnes said, according to Bridge Michigan. "If we have data to think that prisoners are also suffering disproportionately from the virus, then this would be a reason to prioritize prisoners for vaccination as well."