I despise Rubio, I despise how he's handled this, I despise failed officials who made this pandemic worse by ignoring every best practice getting a pass on the situation they created, but this is still a correct decision for two reasons: https://twitter.com/dwuhlfelderlaw/status/1340382137065885698

1) While Congress has been less than useless in the past year, and while leadership failed to create safer processes, members of Congress *are* critical figures and the COVID cases they've had have adversely affected our country. As bad as it is, it could have been even worse.

Our innate sense of fairness seethes about people who created a problem for themselves and everyone else and then get priority for the problem's solution. It's infuriating. I am also very mad about it. But it's the right thing for national security, and even though...

...Rubio is one of the people who don't give a fuck about national security and the well-being of the country, him being a treacherous fuckweasel doesn't change the right thing to do.

2) This pandemic, and especially the vaccine, has been deeply and irrevocably politicized. (Yes, Rubio was one of the people doing that, just to get that stipulation out of the way.) There are huge groups of people who think COVID and the vaccine are liberal plots.

While the best time for the Republican Party to address those conspiracy theories was right after they started, since we don't have a time machine, the second best time is right now. The more Republicans, MAGAts, and "conservative" icons publicly get the vaccine, the better.

Public health is a frustrating field, because people don't behave in optimal ways and don't practice risk reduction. We just don't. And disease prevention happens in populations, not individuals, so you have to work with the individuals you have, for the good of population.

This is a fundamental principle of harm reduction: you have to meet people where they are, not where you want them to be. OBVIOUSLY we would all prefer the Republicans hadn't spent a year denying reality.

But since they did, and since the "COVID is just the flu, the vaccine is a hoax" meme is well set and not going anywhere, every prominent adherent of that meme getting publicly vaccinated helps shift the needle towards vaccine effectiveness.

We don't know yet exactly what the uptake rate is going to have to be to achieve population immunity, but it's going to be a large percentage -- think 70%-80%. The more people see people they trust getting vaccinated, the more likely they are to also get vaccinated.

This is a net positive, even when "the people they trust" are terrible people. That one dose could move the needle on hundreds of not thousands of vaccination decisions, and the earlier you start to do that, the better. (They should have started the messaging two months ago.)

The vaccine supply is limited right now -- that will change as the logistics get easier. (The second vaccine, which doesn't require the same extremely cold storage, was approved yesterday and starts shipping tomorrow; that will help CONSIDERABLY.)

Health care workers absolutely should (and are/will) get priority for the first few shipments. But taking a few doses off the top to address the confidence and public perception issue is important to do, because it counters the Facebook conspiracies.

I've already seen people saying "if it's so safe why isn't Tr*mp getting it" (the answer: we don't know yet if vaccine immunity will last longer or be more effective than the disease antibodies, so people who've had it shouldn't have the vaccine until we know there's a benefit)

And I'd say the same thing if Tr*mp publicly got a dose now even though we need to wait and see how much benefit vaccinating recovered COVID patients benefits them: "wasting" that dose would reduce vaccine hesitancy in populations we desperately need to get vaccinated.

It sucks to watch the people who created this disaster be first in line for a vaccine that probably won't reach us until the spring. I know it does. I'm mad too. But it's still the correct thing for public health and the best outcome from where we are now. That's important.