When I started researching this piece I was going to write why to vaccinate the elderly next (after frontline healthcare & nursing homes). But now everyone agrees on that, so the piece is more about how we got there, and our weird ideas about experts: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22193679/who-should-get-covid-19-vaccine-first-debate-explained

I know and admire lots of professional ethicists. But I don't think ethics should be the domain of professional ethics experts. And a lot of the questions around vaccine prioritization are about ethics, as much as they're about science.

This year has been terrible for institutional trust. I think that's why everyone has their hackles up about criticism of the ACIP - they're nervous about further diminishing trust in the process, or undermining it with slapfights on twitter.

But you can't really achieve institutional trust by circling the wagons, and you can't do ethical and moral decisionmaking in a democracy by asking people to listen to the experts. You have to talk to people. You have to listen to people.

You have to be willing to try to learn things, including from their distrust. And you have to fundamentally believe that the allocation of scarce medical resources in our society is something its citizens get to have opinions about.

Also we should totally allocate the vaccines in the fashion that saves the most lives; stopping people from dying is also good for equity and the economy, since deaths are inequitable and bad for the economy. Glad we're moving towards that.