Speculative fiction time.
Let’s say some new virus springs up on the world stage. It is frighteningly transmissible and extremely fatal. Let’s say… one infected guy boards a plane in London, having been infected the day before and feeling naught but a slight twinge of a headache; when the plane lands in Los Angeles, everyone on board is infected, and two days later they’re all dead except for one or two. Further, assume that the virus is a natural disease, not the product of a biowar lab… or at least, it *looks* natural.
However: the disease is not exactly unknown. The CDC, say, has been aware of it for several years and has been freaking out about the possibility that it’ll blow up, and, shockingly for the glacial and bureaucratic US Government, they’ve been preparing. However, they’re not *entirely* prepared. So as the pandemic jumps up and goes “boo,” the CDC has 100 million vaccination doses ready to go. That’s less than a third of the US population. The question becomes: who gets them? Seems to me that the first people to get them should be the first responders, cops, firefighter and soldiers… AND THEIR FAMILIES. Not only do you need to make sure that the medical professionals survive to take care of the public, but that their families do as well in order to keep the doctors on the job and working. The cops and firefighters need to keep working to keep society from eating itself.
Who’s next? Seems like those required to maintain the infrastructure… nuke plant workers, farmers, air traffic controllers, etc… AND THEIR FAMILIES.
This will still leave a whole lot of folks SOL on getting the vaccine.
But here’s the better question. If the US has a hundred million doses of vaccine against a disease that is otherwise an extinction level event, where else does it get sent? The virus, it seems, is entirely too nasty and fast for other nations to ramp up vaccine production before their populations would be effectively wiped out. There are only a few days before world transport simply ends. Those nations that don’t get the US vaccine will simply be erased from existence except for a few scattered survivors.
Obviously it would seem like the thing to do would be to share the vaccine with our allies. Some to Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, etc. But for every NATO survivor, that’s a dead American. So of those 100 million doses, how many get split off to go elsewhere?
And here’s where it could get *really* tricky: If our adversaries find out that the US has this vaccine, it’s a safe bet that they’ll get pretty damned twitchy. How many to Russia, China, Pakistan just to keep them from deciding to nuke us? Maybe the US decides to spread the vaccinated to rural areas and just accept that the cities are going to be lost? Probably a safe bet anyway… 250 million Americans coming down with the plague and realizing that they’re getting squat are going to get kinda rioty and will burn the cities to the ground. Those Russian nukes might be hitting cities that are already flaming pyres filled with dead folk.
One can also look at it from another viewpoint: the Russians are the ones with the vaccine, or the Chinese, or the Indians. In those cases, it seems a lot less likely that the government in question is going to devote a whole lot of cogitation to the heartache of deciding how many people in which other countries will get the vaccine.
NOTE: I have the niggling suspicion that I posted this same idea a year or four back, but a quick search didn’t turn it up. If so, chalk it up to me being a forgetful old fart.