[dudleypippin]

> During the COVID crisis, many Americans stated a desire to allocate healthcare according to a notion of value to society that elevates those with high social cachet.

All of the professions you mentioned (except, perhaps, “god knows what”) involve interacting with other people as part of their primary function.

I’m sure you can see the wisdom of allocating the initial tranche of vaccines to “people who do valuable work and are at higher risk of causing community spread while doing so” over “people who do valuable work but can do that valuable work while isolated, thus reducing the risk of community spread”?

[renewiltord]

The outcome doesn't bother me. The reasoning for high social value professions vs. low social value does, since it works for non-contagious situations as well.

The teachers continue to be the ones "taking care of our beloved children, the next generation"; The nurses continue to be "healthcare heroes"; the firefighters continue to be "brave and courageous"; all this continues to be true when I'm getting in line to have pancreatic cancer treated. I don't want to die because some pretty primary school teacher showed up at the last moment for that kidney transplant and society has decided that it wants her more than it wants me.

And obviously I have no objection to vaccinating high-degree nodes before low-degree nodes subject to the usual arguments.

[makomk]

It really is about status, though. For example, here in the UK there was a huge amount of pressure to vaccinate policemen early but no such pressure for private security guards, even though security guards were at much higher risk of dying from Covid but the police weren't. Same with, say, teachers and bus drivers. The recurring pattern was that it was the professions with high status that got to push for priority, not the ones with high risk. Our government managed to push back against this in large part because the vaccination roll-out was going well and they managed to argue that prioritizing on things other than age would slow it down, but if it had been slower or some of the unions stronger they might have ended up having to give in.