If a worldwide pandemic occurs, are you comfortable with the fact that dying elderly people will be given an enormous protection and consideration over small children? In an AP report (Detroit Free Press), the order for which potentially life saving inoculations are given are as follows:

1st - Vaccine producers employees, first responders and healthcare workers (no arguments there)

2nd - People up to age 64 with 2 high risk factors (such as heart disease and emphysema)

3rd - Pregnant women, infants and caregivers for immune compromised individuals

4th - Key government leaders and healthy people over 65 (eyebrows raised as the elderly are put ahead of toddlers)

5th - Funeral directors

LAST - Healthy people 2 - 64

Personally, I would be so pissed if by some tragic circumstance, an 80 year old+ person deprived my toddler (or small child) of a life saving shot due to shortages of inocculations.

I realize this is as much a political question as it is an ethical one. Let’s face it, 2 year olds can’t vote, 80 and 90 year olds can, but should that grant them priority over babies or the parents that care for them? I say no as the government embarks on a very politically incorrect, but ethically and morally signficant debate over it:

WASHINGTON — Who should get the first flu vaccine during a worldwide outbreak — a 60-year-old grandmother with weak heart and lungs or a healthy 4-year-old with decades ahead of her?

Government guidelines put the ill grandmother at the head of that line, for now.

But bioethicists at the National Institutes of Health say younger, healthier people should be moved ahead — raising new issues to consider as federal officials review the nation’s pandemic guidelines.

“Death seems more tragic when a child or young adult dies than an elderly person — not because the lives of older people are less valuable, but because the younger person has not had the opportunity to live and develop through all stages of life,” Drs. Ezekiel Emanuel and Alan Wertheimer wrote for today’s issue of the journal Science.

The list rests on a long-used public health principle, that the people most vulnerable to dying from a disease should be vaccinated first.

To the average person, protect-the-young is an equally powerful principle, says Emanuel, who noted that a 65-year-old who dies is often mourned with the “but he had a good life” comfort.

He wants healthy 13-to-40-year-olds to get scarce flu inoculations right after the vaccine-makers and health workers — especially those who are police officers, utility workers or in other professions important to societal order. Younger children and the middle-aged would follow them, with the sick elderly last in line.

Alternatives are being debated, such as whether preschoolers and schoolchildren should be among the first vaccinated during a pandemic because they’re the main spreaders of influenza.

This debate reminds me of the whole lifeboat scenerio, “Who would you save first?” Ask yourself that question in regards to a pandemic outbreak. The American people have a right to answers that put the needs and societal obligations ahead of political agendas. The answer is clear to me, save our children and those that take care of them, first.

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