Get the young vaccinated first

Who are at the head of the vaccine queue? Who should be there? Some answers are easy. Care Home staff and NHS hospital staff, for instance. Then it gets more difficult. The Old – that is, people like my wife and me? A few weeks ago when a District nurse gave my wife a routine blood test and took the opportunity to give us our annual flu jags, she said she expected to be back soon, by the turn of the year perhaps, to give us the anti-Covid vaccine.

Well, that would be welcome of course. It would mean that our children and grandchildren might be able to visit without fearing that they might inadvertently pass on the virus to us. In other respects it would probably make little difference. My wife is in poor health, more or less house-bound. So therefore am I, though healthy myself, or as healthy as I can expect to be at my age. Therefore, even vaccinated, we wouldn’t be gadding about. Day by day our life would be much as it has been throughout this strange year. This being so, is there any good reason why we should be near the head of the queue?

My old friend Magnus Linklater, for whom I used to write when he was editor of “The Scotsman”, thinks not. Magnus is a small handful of years younger than me, and is nevertheless within sight of his eightieth birthday.

Writing in The Times today, he said that priority should be given to the young: to those from deprived neighbourhoods, to those starting work, to those searching for work, to students deprived of the experience of university life which we all enjoyed in our time. I’ve a lot of sympathy with this, remembering for instance that study (which can of course now be done on-line) was only one part of university life, not always the most important, certainly not the most memorable; university was also about conversation, sport, societies, theatres and cinemas, cafes and pubs, hours spent in sociable idleness – all these things denied to students just now.

Life for a great many young people has been on hold for a year; and a year is much longer when you are eighteen than when you are eighty.

Magnus also remarked that many of us in our twilight years remain in generally good health. We may be taking a handful of tablets or capsules every day, and we mostly have aches and pains, but we get by. We still have a good appetite. We still walk the dog. Some of us still fish or play golf or even tennis. The average age of Covid-related deaths is 82 or 82.5 but, in a great many cases, even the majority of cases, other pre-existing conditions contribute to the death: heart or liver or kidney disease, asthma, trouble with the prostate in the case of men, cancer, diabetes and obesity. You can, I’m sure, all add to the list.

What few of us ancients can claim to be is economically useful. Of course the economy isn’t everything, and few would wish to see a test of economic value being applied to the allocation of the vaccine, and not only because there are young and middle-aged people who, if only temporarily, at present contribute no more to the economy than octogenarian pensioners. Nevertheless it is still a case of “the economy, stupid” being important.

We are all going to be worse off if it remains stagnant and unemployment figures soar. Deploying the vaccine to revive the hospitality sector would be sensible, adding also to the gaiety of the nation. Tradesmen and small shopkeepers need custom. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gladstone spoke of letting money “fructify” in the pockets of the people; it fructifies locally and nationally when taken out of the pockets and spent.

Directing vaccinations to tradespeople and those who run small businesses and have been hard hit by lockdown is economically sensible and also a fair recompense for the hardship such people have experienced this year.

Rather to my surprise most of the comments on Magnus’s article in The Times were hostile, some abusive. The general line was simple: the old are the most like to die if they contract the virus; therefore they must be at the head of the vaccine queue. Moreover, as one contributor said, we don’t have that many years ahead of us; delay in getting the vaccine hits all the harder. Good emotional stuff.

Well, we can’t all be at the head of the queue and we can’t all have prizes. I’m inclined to agree with Magnus that, in his words; “Far better that we, who have lived most of our lives, should be exposed rather than those just setting out”.

Which doesn’t mean that if a nurse comes calling with a needle, I will do the Philip Sidney stuff, point to another and say, “his need is greater than mine”. Not at all. I’ll roll my sleeve up and say “thank you”.