me, Me, ME!

There is growing amount of advocacy for particular UK groups to become priorities to receive the limited stocks of Covid-19 vaccines first (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/18/vaccine-priority-who-should-get-covid-jab-next-uk ). There are several things to note. Firstly, there is no perfect way of doing this, as it depends on what criteria you use and how you weight them. You could use inherent characteristics, that put individuals at increased risk. In this case, the elderly, folk with underlying health conditions, members of BAME (black and minority ethnic groups) and people with learning disabilities would all score highly. You could use situational factors intrinsic to roles, that increase an individual's chances of contracting or transmitting the viral infection. If this criterion was used, frontline medical staff, people in care homes, teachers, police, retail staff and transport workers would come out near the top. You could even use, the individuals's perceived utility, in terms of keeping society functioning. In this case, teachers, police and retail staff would get a boost. Of course, some people might be members of more than one group (e.g. a BAME teacher, with diabetes, who drove the school bus) but I assume it would be too complex to rank individuals. Secondly, there still seems to be overly-simplistic assumption in some circles that, once you have had your jab, you are 'good to go'. No vaccine gives 100% protection. A single jab (apparently) gives a reasonable level of protection but even this takes between 12 and 14 days to develop. If the vaccines are administered, in the way they were evaluated, with 3 weeks between the 1st and 2nd jabs, it is about 5 weeks before an individual gets full protection. I wonder if these considerations have been factored in by all the advocates? Would you want to wait 5 weeks for all your teachers to be as protected as far as possible, before sending them back into the classrooms? Thirdly, populations will only get something nearer full protection from mass vaccination programmes, when a very substantial number of people they are likely to contact have also received 2 injections and have waited the necessary time to get the full benefit. It should, of course, be obvious (we travel for education, business and holiday reasons to other countries) that, protection will be optimised, when successful mass vaccination has been carried out everywhere. A thing that worries me about the vaccine prioritisation debate is that, it might be 'won', by groups that can shout loudest or who have the most powerful advocates. We have not even raised, as yet, the potential effects of antivaxx sentiment on our ability to achieve good protection of society. They also shout loudly!