Jumping the vaccine queue, once frowned upon, is suddenly in vogue. Not long ago, health care workers would get in trouble for calling around to see who wanted doses that would otherwise expire. Now the news media are openly worrying about the fate of those leftovers. Journalists and health advice blogs alike are praising websites like Dr. B, where those who want to get vaccinated ahead of schedule can sign up to be informed when a local facility has extra doses. Half a million people have joined.

Then there’s vaccine tourism, which was only recently considered a wicked flaunting of wealth. Now it’s just another curious foible of the wealthy—and, on dating sites, the new hotness.

What’s going on here?

Some of the shift is doubtless explained by a growing realization that Covid-19 vaccines, once seen as scarce, are soon likely to be plentiful—a view surely fueled by Biden administration’s promise that there will be enough doses for all Americans by May 1. Queue-jumping doesn’t seem so wrong if you expect the queue to be short.

But I want to suggest something else might also be involved in the attitude swing: a reevaluation of the rollout strategy itself. Different states, in some places even different counties, have adopted different priority lists. Although I’m all for federalism and diversity, it’s easy to see why the mishmash would lead to diminished confidence in the correctness of the rules governing the queue.

In a just society, the fact that an act is illegal provides a strong argument against doing the act. But the prohibition isn’t absolute, because the law itself can be unjust. The less just the law, the weaker the case against breaking it.

In the case of the vaccine rollout, the variety and arbitrariness of the rules has made rule-breaking more tempting. Consider, for example, last month’s report that Louisianans suffering from compromised immune systems were traveling to Mississippi for vaccinations because their home state had not yet declared them an eligible category. I trust that no one would argue, in the now-famous words of a Florida’s sheriff deputy, that this particular set of queue-jumpers has “stolen a vaccine from somebody that needs it more.” (Yes, I know that the deputy was arresting two queue-jumpers who dressed up to look older than they were. The question of whether disguising oneself as a member of an eligible category is worse than lying about the state of one’s residence we must leave for another day.)

Connecticut, where my wife and I live and work, is one of only two states (the other is Maine) that have decided to prioritize by age rather than level of risk. My state’s excuse—that working out which comorbidities should matter is too hard—doesn’t come close to passing the giggle test. Other states have managed, and for those officials who genuinely doubt their own capacities to sort, the Centers for Disease Control maintains a list. But enraged advocates for the disabled found their protests falling on deaf ears.

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