The philosophy of life?

We are into the second year of the pandemic.

On January 21, 2020, there was confirmation of Patient One.  Six weeks after that, schools and offices closed, and working from home became the norm.

We knew that eventually vaccines will be needed to deliver us from the pandemic.  We knew that right when schools and offices closed.  Many of us assumed that the machinery of the government would create various task-forces in order to deal with the multiple aspects of vaccine delivery.

While that assumption is logical, it did not work out that way.  It has been a colossal failure.

They didn't even bother to layout a clear plan for priority among the population.  Who gets the vaccine first?  Who are the people who can be sent to the back of the line for vaccination?  Even worse has been the messaging about it.

The World Health Organization (WHO) developed a blueprint, which notes: "Setting priorities and rationing resources in this context means making tragic choices, but these tragic choices can be ethically justified. This is why we have ethics."

That is why we have ethics.  What a concept!

A commentary, in The American Journal of Medicine, on the ethical dimension of allocating vaccines during a pandemic, reminds us that "the benefits of vaccines are communal in the sense that vaccinating 1 individual confers benefits on other members of the community as well. What is to be fairly allocated, then,is not the vaccines per se but, rather, the benefits thereof."

If it is about the benefits of vaccination, then who gets priority?  What are the ethics in this?

Allocating vaccines to those most responsible for the trans-mission of COVID-19 may confer more benefit to the population at large. Allocation guidelines must balance the obligation to assist individuals most likely to benefit against the obligation to secure the greatest aggregate benefit across the population.

The greatest benefit across the population.  So, who gets priority?

It is one hell of a tough question, and I don't want to pretend that I know better than others.

Think about a person like my 91-year old father, who hasn't stepped out over the year, versus a 31-year old high school teacher.  Vaccinating which of these two will "secure the greatest aggregate benefit across the population"?  The elderly, in this logic, will have to step away from the line for now, right?

WHO notes in that blueprint that the population "falling into each category may change over time."  This is also something that leaders should have communicated to people, right?  They did not.

So, it is clear that confusion will reign.  "Is there something that you would offer us as a general guideline as people wait their turn?"

Maybe it's a time to think about character and personal values and emphasize the importance now more than ever of the virtues of patience, of empathy, of recognizing that not everybody can protect themselves the way perhaps I might be positioned or you might be positioned to protect themselves from infection and disease, and of solidarity. It maybe is a little bit too trite to say that we're all in this together. Some of us are suffering far more than others of us, but we are all really suffering. And so if we can remember - right? - to be patient, to be empathetic and to be committed to making this world better than it was before, I think we can get through this.

As we wait our turns, perhaps we can also read up and think more about ethics.  We don't have to abandon that effort just because philosophy departments are being closed down!