PALO ALTO — More than a hundred Stanford Health Care medical residents and fellows marched through the school’s signature hospital to protest administrators’ rollout plans for the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, asserting that they were mostly left out in spite of their regular contact with patients infected with the virus.
Bolstered by uproarious chants like “First in the room, back of the line,” the Friday morning demonstration spurred a relatively prompt response from hospital leaders, including from Stanford Health Care CEO David Entwhistle, who told the assembled crowd: “We’ll correct it. We know that it’s wrong.”
The seeds of the protest were planted earlier this week after Stanford announced how it was going to distribute its initial allocation of vaccines — upwards of 5,000 doses — inspiring a letter to administrators stating that just seven of 1,349 medical residents and fellows, “including those on the front line directly treating COVID-19 patients,” falling in the pecking order beneath faculty working from home “with no in-person patient responsibilities, who were selected for vaccination.”
Friday was the first day those vaccines were scheduled to be given.
After its vaccine announcement, Dr. Niraj Sehgal, chief medical officer for Stanford Health Care, said “we are planning and preparing for the ability to vaccinate everyone — hopefully by the end of January.”
How those would be administered, he said, will be based on a “sequencing” process rooted in four principles: preserving the health of its central health care workforce, protecting the most vulnerable, ensuring equity, and providing transparency. Job duties would be weighted, as well as risk factors such like age, with department heads helping form the final recipient list.
That did not pass muster with the medical residents and fellows, who in the run-up to Friday’s protest took to social media to register their dismay with the initial rollout strategy. In response to a Stanford news release on the plan, Earth Hasassri, a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow, tweeted Friday morning: “Except you forgot about those of us on the front lines: residents and fellows were essentially not included in the first round of vaccines despite working 80+ hours per week in the hospital treating COVID-19 patients.”
Internal-medicine fellow Christine Santiago used that tweet as a springboard to add, “Disparities in distribution of the vaccine can be seen at a micro level at Stanford today. I worry that the situation we see at (Stanford) is a harbinger of population level inequities of vaccine distribution for our underserved communities.”
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) December 18, 2020
Inside the hospital, one medical resident participating in the demonstration made clear that they were speaking up for more than themselves.
“It’s not just about the residents. We stand here to represent our nurses,” he said in a video posted by the San Francisco Chronicle, before noting that just two nurses in the pediatric emergency department were offered vaccines. “We are here to back them. Our respiratory therapists, our environmental services workers, food staff, everybody.”
Check back later for updates to this story.
