Next up, according to state plans: staff and the mostly elderly residents of long-term facilities that account for more than a third of the state’s overall coronavirus death total, which has surpassed 11,000.
But with initial doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine still scarce, county health departments and local hospitals are faced with difficult choices on how to prioritize vaccines after these top-level groups.
“These are incredibly difficult decisions,” Jeffrey Byrnes, a Grand Valley State University philosophy professor and medical ethicist, told Bridge Michigan.
“This is a real high wire act. This is the kind of thing that 10, 20 years ago would have been drafted as a hypothetical and perhaps overly dramatic textbook problem. Now we are facing this in real time.”
As early doses of COVID-19 vaccines arrive in Michigan, there’s no dispute over who’s first in line: front-line hospital workers and medical first responders who have battled the virus for months.
Next up, according to state plans: staff and the mostly elderly residents of long-term facilities that account for more than a third of the state’s overall coronavirus death total, which has surpassed 11,000.
This story was co-published with Bridge Magazine.
But with initial doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine still scarce, county health departments and local hospitals are faced with difficult choices on how to prioritize vaccines after these top-level groups.