Cutting, bribing, stealing: Some people get COVID-19 vaccines before it s their turn
Grace Hauck, USA TODAY
Bribing doctors. Circulating vaccination appointment codes. Chartering planes and impersonating essential workers.
More than a month since the USA began administering COVID-19 vaccines, many people who were not supposed to be first in line have received vaccinations. Anecdotal reports suggest people deliberately leveraged widespread vulnerabilities in the distribution process to acquire vaccine. Others were just in the right place at the right time. There s dozens and dozens of these stories, and they really show that the rollout was a complete disaster in terms of selling fairness, said Arthur Caplan, who heads the medical ethics division at the NYU School of Medicine. It wasn’t that we didn’t have consensus (on who should go first). We didn’t pay attention to logistics, and that drove distribution, not rules.