Is it ever okay to jump to the front of the vaccine line? An ethics expert weighs in; Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), March 23, 2021

Stacy Weiner, Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC); Is it ever okay to jump to the front of the vaccine line? An ethics expert weighs in

When a good is scarce, people sometimes behave badly to get it. Renowned bioethicist Arthur Caplan, PhD, offers advice on how to make the COVID-19 vaccine rollout more equitable, ethical, and trustworthy.

"What went wrong with applying ethical principles to vaccine distribution?

First, it became hard to roll out the vaccines to the priority groups, particularly the elderly. It turns out it’s not a great idea to ask them to make appointments on the internet [since they often lack access]. Also, some of them were homebound, so they couldn't get to vaccination sites.

As for health care workers, that term was never clearly defined. I think people had in mind front-line workers, but some hospitals and health systems were vaccinating everybody, including people who did psychotherapy remotely, even bioethicists and the board of trustees. So it looked to the public as though the rich were getting advantages. It looked like minority people weren't getting anything much — and they often weren’t.

If people think you're prejudiced, the sense of fairness falls apart, and then fewer people are willing to follow the rules. 

In addition, once you opened Moderna and Pfizer [vials of] vaccines, you had to finish them. [Moderna has 10 doses per vial, and Pfizer has five or six.] But nobody issued any guidance about how to redistribute vaccines that are about to go bad. That destroyed trust because people said, “Well, you're just giving it to anybody who's nearby or somebody who waits in line for six hours.” All of that made better sense than throwing it away — but none of that was following any agreed-upon rules.

The rollout has been unfair, inefficient, and frustrating. It’s made the public angry, and it’s made them not trust in government.""

Sold: An 1891 Patent by Granville T. Woods, Innovative Black Engineer; Atlas Obscura, July 22, 2020

Matthew Taub, Atlas Obscura; Sold: An 1891 Patent by Granville T. Woods, Innovative Black Engineer

Woods was prolific, but was largely forgotten for many years after his death.

"Beginning during Woods’s lifetime, trade publications and other newspapers took to calling Woods the “Black Edison,” a nickname that reflected the virtual absence of Black Americans in engineering during Reconstruction and the late 19th century. That reality haunted Woods, who, according to a recent belated obituary in The New York Times, often said that he was born in Australia in order to distance himself from the strictures of America’s racial hierarchy. Though Woods found (relatively) more financial success later in life, after selling a series of inventions to the likes of General Electric and George Westinghouse—including an early version of the “dead man’s brake,” which can stop a train with an incapacitated conductor—he was still deprived of the recognition that others in his field enjoyed. In fact, despite working at the top of his field, alongside figures such as Westinghouse, Woods was buried in an unmarked grave in Queens, which only received a stone in 1975.

His life is a lesson not only in science and innovation, but also in the precariousness of legacy. Inventors, says Fouché—both those who enjoy credit and those who are denied it—rarely innovate in isolation. Many brilliant minds work simultaneously on the same problem, and for reasons of prejudice, luck, or law, just a few of them enter the historical record."

Atheists tend to be seen as immoral – even by other atheists: study; Agence France-Presse in Paris via Guardian, August 7, 2017

Agence France-Presse in Paris via Guardian; Atheists tend to be seen as immoral – even by other atheists: study

"“It is striking that even atheists appear to hold the same intuitive anti-atheist bias,” the study’s co-author, Will Gervais, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, said.

“I suspect that this stems from the prevalence of deeply entrenched pro-religious norms. Even in places that are currently quite overtly secular, people still seem to intuitively hold on to the believe that religion is a moral safeguard.”

Only in Finland and New Zealand, two secular countries, did the experiment not yield conclusive evidence of anti-atheist prejudice, said the team."

The Gifted: X-Men TV Series is “About Bigotry” in 2017; Den Of Geek, July 25, 2017

David Crow, Den Of Geek; The Gifted: X-Men TV Series is “About Bigotry” in 2017

"Of all the many, many creations in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s extensive oeuvre, few have ever proven as potent for allegory and transmutative topicality as the mutants themselves. In other words, no superhero creation has been as fertile for political commentary as the X-Men. This is something that The Gifted, a new Fox network series set in the X-Men universe, is going to expand on in new and challenging ways for 2017. And it’s something the cast is very proud about.

“Yeah, I’m going to say straight-up you guys, our show’s about bigotry,” actress Emma Dumont tells me during an interview for The Gifted after the series’ San Diego Comic-Con panel. “I’m sorry, but we see it in the first scene when Blink’s running for her life and a cop could easily kill her dead with zero consequences, because of prejudice, because of prejudging her for something people are uncomfortable with, that they don’t understand, because people are born with this thing, and that is literally where we live.”"

I’ve always voted Republican. Until now.; Washington Post, 8/17/16

Daniel Akerson, Washington Post; I’ve always voted Republican. Until now. :

"And I have always voted for Republicans for president. Not this year.

The compelling rationale behind this decision: leadership. A good leader must demonstrate such qualities as competence, integrity, empathy, character and temperament. Hillary Clinton has these essential qualities. Donald Trump does not.

Trump simply lacks the competence to serve as president of the United States...

Long ago, I learned an old Navy saying from a good friend and now-retired admiral: “Ship, shipmate, self.” This motto set the priorities for my life during my service. The civilian equivalent would be “country, fellow citizen, self.” As individuals and as a nation, we must aspire to serve the greater good. We must exhibit the empathy that places the greater good of the nation and its people above individual self-interest.

Unfortunately, Trump has appealed to the lowest common denominators in our society: prejudice, xenophobia and intolerance...

What kind of person equates the sacrifice of the loss of a child to that of creating jobs or making money?"