Stanford Hospital Frontline Workers Protest Vaccine Distribution After Being Passed Over for Remote Workers

Stanford Medicine's original COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan left out nearly all of its front-line workers from the first round of immunizations, sparking protests last week. According to a report by NPR, medical residents and fellows staged a protest on Friday morning, demanding to know why they were not getting the first round of vaccines available. Stanford apologized later in the day, calling this an "error" and promising to revise the plan.

A council of Stanford's chief residents sent a letter to Stanford's leadership team on Thursday night, explaining why they were so frustrated with the vaccination plan. It noted: "Many of us know senior faculty who have worked from home since the pandemic began in March 2020, with no in-person patient responsibilities, who were selected for vaccination. In the meantime, we residents and fellows strap on N95 masks for the tenth month of this pandemic without a transparent and clear plan for our protection in place." The residents — doctors in training who have graduated medical school — are exposed to COVID-19 regularly.

The protest drew widespread media attention and, on Friday evening, Stanford leaders issued a public statement apologizing for the issue. It read: "We take complete responsibility and profusely apologize to all of you. We fully recognize we should have acted more swiftly to address the errors that resulted in an outcome we did not anticipate. We are working quickly to address the flaws in our plan and develop a revised version."

Still, this ignored one of the major complaints in the protesters' original letter, which read: "While leadership is pointing to an error in an algorithm meant to ensure equity and justice, our understanding is this error was identified on Tuesday and a decision was made not to revise the vaccine allocation scheme before its release today."

The apology from Stanford's leaders promised that the new plan would ensure vaccines for "a substantial segment of our community," without directly promising that residents would be included in the first round. Stanford Health Care reportedly received 5,000 doses of the vaccine, while its 1,300 residents were not offered any.

The algorithm both sides referred to in their public statements is a computer program used to determine which health care workers were at the highest risk for contracting COVID-19 through workplace exposures. It also accounted for factors like age, location and which unit they worked in in the hospital. The algorithm may have placed residents low on its list because they are typically young, and do not have a single assigned location.

"Algorithms are made by people and the results... were reviewed multiple times by people," one anonymous Stanford resident wrote in an email to NPR. "The ones who ultimately approved the decisions are responsible. If this is an oversight, even if unintentional, it speaks volumes about how the front line staff and residents are perceived: an afterthought, only after we've protested. There's an utter disconnect between the administrators and the front line workers. This is also reflective that no departmental chair or chief resident was involved in the decision making process."