Crocodile tears and the mad rush

The covid vaccine will possibly be made available to me sooner than to other people who probably need it more

That's thanks to my job. Although the details of the vaccine rollout are still sketchy, it seems that my state ranks employment at a university one step ahead of the general public when it comes to getting the vaccine.

I don't believe I should be given any special priority. 

While I do work at a university, I do not teach. Even in normal times, interacting with the general public, with university students, or even with fellow university staff is only part of my job--and it's a lesser part. I can do the bulk of my job isolated in a room. In lockdown times such as ours, I've had the option to work from home and have not (yet) suffered any loss of pay or threat of layoff. My supervisors and institution have insisted that I and most of my colleaguesdon't have to work onsite at all if I so choose. (The same can't be said of custodial workers and some of my more public-facing colleagues. They face varying degrees of compulsion when comes to declining to work onsite.)

I am probably not in a high risk group. I am 47 and have no covid-aggravating conditions, at least as far as I know. My spouse is similarly situated (again, as far as we know). So it's probably not the case that my getting a vaccine is as necessary as it would be if I were obviously at risk or lived with someone who is.

I realize that setting vaccine priorities--or setting priorities for distributing any scarce good--entails drawing lines. Any line-drawing will get things at least a little bit wrong. It will be overinclusive, underinclusive, or both. That's the nature of line-drawing.

To that end, creating a class of people that includes me, a person who (probably) needs the vaccine less than others, might very well be justified as part of a process that includes some people who need it a lot more than I do.

In fact, I'm open, in the abstract at least, to even more facially "unfair" approaches to vaccine distribution. I can imagine an argument for vaccinating younger and healthier persons first, on the grounds that they'll then be less likely to spread covid a-symptomatically and perhaps slow the spread overall. I can also imagine an argument for adopting freer market principles. It's at least possible that a price system might overall lead to more efficient vaccine distribution.

Please, please, please. Don't respond to this post as if I'm arguing for either of those approaches. Whatever merit they might have, they go against my intuition for fairness.

That said, that "intuition for fairness" shines more brightly at some times than others. I usually have few, or no pangs of guilt when I enjoy things others don't. When I do feel guilty, the feeling amounts to a brief bout of crocodile tears, tears which redound to my benefit by making me seem (to myself, if not to others) like a thoughtful person. And then I can ignore the guilt. It's a little harder to avoid--but only a little--during the inequitable (so it seems to me) vaccine distribution. The inequity in this case is only more visible than normal.

I'll almost definitely take the vaccine when it's offered. I may feel wistfully guilty for a few minutes, and perhaps tsk-tsk the unfairness of the process. But then--assuming I have no adverse reaction to the vaccine--I'll go on my way.