I agree with what you're saying, and made the same decision myself. I was advised by someone who'd looked into it that I could have qualified as a healthcare worker and gotten into phase 1B or 1C, because my startup Cyph has customers in the healthcare industry. However, I work remotely and don't have all that much human contact even outside of a pandemic, so it didn't make sense to me to skip the line and take a more deserving person's spot on a technicality. (I am fully vaccinated now, though.)

That being said, based on the limited information in this thread, it seems to me that Paul unfortunately started a whole lot of drama over nothing.

My choice was a personal decision that made sense for me, not an absolute moral value that I feel entitled to impose on the world. I don't know these people's situations, or why they felt they needed the shot more urgently than I did, but even if our situations were identical it's not obvious that my decision was more correct. Arguably, they were more correct based on the position from the NY Times article someone else linked ("If you're offered a vaccine, take it"). At worst there's an argument that they were inconsiderate, but it's silly to raise a stink about such a morally grey issue.

If anyone is truly upset about this, why not instead write/call whichever level of government is responsible for having structured the system such that these things happen and are neither illegal nor discouraged?

Here’s the thing: public officials created procedures with estimates based upon who qualifies. If you qualified and didn’t take it, you actually created inefficiencies in the system, and slowed down rollout.

Source: friend in high up gov in CA

I’m one independent contractor doing engineering at one farm. I’d be surprised if I was even on whatever list was used to estimate what must be tens of thousands of farm workers in CA. In fact farm workers are so often undocumented they cannot have an accurate tally.

I don't think it matters. They wanted to pipeline people, knowing that some would technically qualify but be lower priority, but efficiency was the most important thing. That and each person getting vaccinated means less risk to them, less risk to spread to others, and less risk to mutation.

That argument only applies if they are demand limited. If they are, sure, great, get a vaccine. If they aren't, then you are quite literally keeping someone else from getting a vaccine.

I read the news regularly and the bulletins from the San Mateo County health advisor. During the time I qualified they were still running out of doses every week for front line workers. I am not a front line worker. It was not my place.

Shot in the arm as soon as it is offered saves lives by being one less person that will spread the virus to someone vulnerable.

Shots in arms for people in neighborhoods with a much higher rate of infection and death from COVID are more valuable than shots in arms in neighborhoods like mine where people could work from home and were basically unscathed.

I understand what you’re saying but the neighborhoods in question weren’t prioritized randomly.

I should probably have been at the end of the list. I work from home, had a pod that works from home and we're all able to take precautions when we go to the stores. A grocery store cashier faces people for 8 hours a day and is therefore a huge risk to themselves and to all their customers. There's no reason to claim the two of us are at all equivalent (assuming that we are in the same personal risk group.)

I’ve been extremely cautious with covid and I do not need to interact with the public beyond quick and careful grocery store visits. It would be better for a front line worker, who is not able to exercise the same level of avoidance, to get it than for me to have gotten it. I also do not live with any immunocompromised people - we are all healthy and under 40 and they work from home - so again it was better for someone who lives with an older person to have gotten it.

I'll applaud what you did. Early on there was a very clear need for those at risk to be vaccinated and the guidelines for essential farm workers were pretty clearly meant for those getting food to tables who were working in close quarters with others.

The odds of one of them getting and spreading it to many others were much greater for them than you, and that's what needed to be considered.

That’s right. I pass by several farms on the way to work and there’s a lot of people working in close groups and using shared housing. Thats who those shots are for. I show up to work at 4:30pm and work at a computer till 10 or 11pm. If all the tech workers were on some vaccine list for some reason I’d have done it, but I’m not the kind of “farm worker” those doses were intended for.