| Hey readers, Do you want a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine ASAP? Of course you do. But so do 7.8 billion other people around the globe. So the question is, who should get access to the vaccine first? Experts have proposed a few different ways of answering this question. The World Health Organization has said there should be an initial phase where all countries get vaccine doses in proportion to their population: 3 percent of every country's population would get the vaccine before any country moves on to 4 or 5 percent. This proportional allocation would continue until every country has vaccinated 20 percent. This sounds like a nice and equal approach, but it's not actually equitable. Two countries can have similar-sized populations but very different case counts from Covid-19. One goal would be to drive more help toward the countries with the greatest disease burden so as many lives can be saved as possible. There's another approach that suggests giving out doses to each country in proportion to its number of health care workers, elderly people, and people with underlying conditions. But there's a problem here, too. Because low-income countries tend to have fewer elderly citizens and health care workers per capita, this approach gives less of the vaccine to countries that are already burdened with shorter life expectancies and shakier medical systems. In a new paper published in Science, a group of medical ethics experts proposes an approach called the Fair Priority Model. They lay out a plan for distributing the vaccine in three phases. Positing that our main goal should be to avert premature deaths, they suggest using Standard Expected Years of Life Lost (SEYLL) averted per dose as the criterion in phase one. They say we should give priority to countries that would reduce more SEYLL per dose. In phase two, which aims to reduce pandemic-induced economic deprivation, they give priority to countries that would reduce more SEYLL and reduce more poverty. In phase three, which aims to end community spread, they give priority to countries with higher transmission rates. This model offers a clever way to reduce serious harms and give priority to disadvantaged people on an international scale. But that raises the question: What about on the national scale? Within a single country, how should we determine who gets the vaccine first? A near-consensus has emerged around the idea that front-line health care workers should be among the first to be vaccinated because their chosen profession puts them at high risk. Yet there are other people who are at high risk by virtue of something more immutable: the color of their skin. We know that Covid-19 has disproportionately taken the lives of Black people and other people of color in the US. So some — including Melinda Gates — argue that they should have access to the vaccine first. Others have raised concerns, though. What if many non-Black people resent Black people for getting prioritized, heaping more stigma and racism upon them? What if many Black people don't feel comfortable being first in line for a new vaccine, given the very real and horrific history of medical experimentation on African Americans? Some folks raised this worry in response to Gates, saying, "We are not crash test dummies, we'll go after you," and, "In other words, we're the guinea pigs." A few experts have proposed a promising workaround: Instead of using race or ethnicity as the criterion, we can use location (probably at the zip code level) when deciding where to concentrate vaccine allocation. That would allow us to target low-income communities with fewer health care options and more underlying medical conditions. This is the workaround that was just proposed in a 114-page plan sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The authors note that the disproportionate death rate among people of color "reflects the impact of systemic racism leading to higher rates of comorbidities that increase the severity of Covid-19 infection and the socioeconomic factors that increase likelihood of acquiring the infection." They say it's best to focus on the social determinants rather than on "discrete racial or ethnic categories." So, when a safe and effective vaccine becomes available, you just might see it allocated to areas of high social vulnerability and given out at spots that people living there can easily access. —Sigal Samuel, @SigalSamuel | 
اللباس التقليدي الحضرمي للرجال مرحبا بكم في سلسلة اللباس التقليدي الحضرمي .. لنتعرف معا على تراثنا ...وربما أن بعض هذه الملابس لم تعد مس...
شغل الشاعر سعيد فرج باحريز رحمه الله الناس في المكلا وحضرموت عموماً باشعاره التي كانت لها مدلولات عميقة وثاقبة ومعانٍ بليغة وحكيم...
