Towards the end of the fall semester, Kelley Nicholson-Flynn, administrator and teacher at a private school in the Bronx, gave her high school bioethics elective a prescient task: making a vaccination prioritization list.
She divided her students at Riverdale Country School into groups and asked them tough questions. Who should be vaccinated first, teachers or grocery workers? Should you prioritize people over 75? Or all those over 65?
Just a few weeks later, the abstract questions she asked in the classroom became concrete when she became eligible for vaccination in New York.
Nicholson-Flynn, 51, has led his school’s reopening effort and personally works five days a week. Still, her school has good resources, she is not at high risk and her in-laws in her 80s have not yet been vaccinated.
“As a leader and administrator, I also felt that I should vaccinate all of my teachers before I was vaccinated,” she said. “I wish there was a system that said more granularly, ‘these people understand, so these people.'”
She finally received the vaccine and posted it on Facebook, sharing her enthusiasm and guilt. Others who were vaccinated felt the same, saying they knew people who deserved it before them.
As more people got vaccinated, what should have been a celebratory relief event came with mixed emotions. The scarcity of vaccines, maladministration, uneven distribution and histories of expired doses have made some who received it feel guilty, although their states have declared that it is their turn to vaccinate.
Dr. Tafadzwa Muguwe, a doctor at a Massachusetts hospital who has been treating Covid-19 patients since March, was very grateful to receive his first dose in December. He had seen the dangers of the virus up close for people of all ages and now he didn’t have to worry about holding his son when he got home from work.
Between Muguwe’s first and second dose, his feelings got more complicated after his mother, who lives in Zimbabwe, contracted Covid-19.
“I have no idea when or if she will get the vaccine,” said Muguwe, 38. When his mother and other family members fell ill, he spent the entire weekend on WhatsApp, advising on how to take care of his care from thousands of miles away.
“It’s not just about having the means,” he said. “There is no medical system that will save lives in the same way as the one I belong to.”
As grateful as he was for the historical innovations that created a Covid-19 vaccine as quickly and as deservedly as he felt, the weight of the uneven global distribution weighed on him.
Vaccinated individuals compared to others are often empathetic and compassionate, but ultimately unproductive, said Jessica Stern, clinical psychologist and assistant professor at NYU Langone Health.
“Individuals don’t necessarily have to worry about these systems to decide whether they deserve it,” she said. “Responding to Covid is a common team effort. As much as we have to work as a team to adopt safety precautions, it is also our responsibility to get the vaccine ”.
Gestures of guilt or waiting for the injection may end up further disrupting the system, she said. Still, feeling guilty is natural when the launch is random and Americans are inundated with conflicting messages from state and federal officials.
Kale Langley, 24, did not classify his job evaluation work as a teaching assistant at New York University as essential and did not expect to receive the vaccine until the summer. But when a friend told him that TAs qualified, he filled out the New York City questionnaire. News had just circulated of thousands of doses expiring or being thrown away.
“When New York received 1.2 million doses and administered 400,000, I thought, ‘This is probably not entirely unethical of me.’ The bottleneck is not finding people qualified for the vaccine ”.
Langley, frustrated at not being able to “trust the state to be a rational actor” in his distribution, got an appointment at a Bronx hospital and decided to go ahead.
“I show up and it’s me, a 24-year-old white guy from the Bronx, and it’s all these nurses and doctors being vaccinated near me,” he said. “I felt like a complete idiot, like I shouldn’t be there.”
Although still excited to receive the injection, Langley did not share that he was vaccinated on social media.
“I exist on an internet of strangers who read my words outside the context of knowing myself,” he said. “It’s clear from my tweets that I’m not doing frontline work. People can totally destroy me online because of that. “
The guilt that people like Langley feel can be described as a “variation of the survivor’s guilt,” said Stern.
“When people feel this sense of guilt, they feel unworthy. We see this with Covid’s transmission and survival, but also with the vaccine. “
Stern compared it to those who experienced collective trauma and how it is often not possible to explain why one person can move forward more easily than another.
“Covid’s vaccination seems like a tool to move forward and some people get it before others,” sometimes without much meaning or explanation, and sometimes just by luck, said Stern.
Trish Felix, 55, considers herself one of the lucky ones. Felix works in development at a private school in New Jersey and does his job easily at home. She qualified for the vaccine according to state guidelines for school officials.
“At first it seemed tidy, as if I was going to be put in this big magical queue in New Jersey and was picking up on someone more deserving,” she said of her initial hesitation. But then she watched the dysfunctional launch, the way you had to sit on a web page updating for hours to find a place.
Now, she said, “I don’t really think I’m on any kind of virtual line.”
“I think everyone should do their best to have a chance. I help out a little, even if I get ahead of the committed people I live with. I am helping to protect them. “
Dr. Fatima Z. Syed, an internist at Duke Primary Care in North Carolina, said she hopes that most people who offer the vaccine will end up taking Felix’s action.
Syed, 33, had her own feelings of guilt when she was vaccinated. She serves patients all day who talk about pandemic anxiety and loneliness, or have moved to the region to be closer to their grandchildren who now cannot see.
Ultimately, she said, people said to be essential and eligible for the vaccine should trust those who classified them as such.
“The implementations that are happening are based on evidence, it is not happening for nothing,” she said. Even if you don’t feel important to recover from the pandemic, your vaccination helps.
“We don’t ask our patients for anything that we don’t have evidence. If you have the opportunity to be vaccinated, take advantage. “