Who will get the vaccine first? Here's where you might land in line.
Health officials are wrestling with who should be first to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Is it time to redefine what’s fair?
Whenever a new vaccine gets approved, health officials have to tackle the difficult question of who should be first in line to receive it. Typically health-care workers are first, and in previous outbreaks, such as the H1N1 swine flu in 2009, people whose health was most vulnerable got priority, too.
With the widely anticipated COVID-19 vaccine, there’s a new factor being considered: fairness.
On October 2, the National Academy of Medicine revealed its recommendations for COVID-19 vaccine distribution in an influential 237-page framework commissioned by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report proposes distributing a vaccine in four phases as it becomes available. The first recipients are obvious picks: health-care workers, emergency responders,
