Kate knows best

Oregon's governor, Kate Brown, is taking a lot of heat for putting schoolteachers in front of 80-year-old people in the Covid vaccine queue. It's against the CDC guidelines, but she's determined.

As the O explains (in a story they want you to pay to read):

As a result of Brown’s priorities, vaccinations for school employees will begin en masse Monday. Oregonians who are 80 and older won’t be eligible for vaccines until Feb. 8. It could be March before all seniors 65 and up are eligible, with state officials now not committing to precise start dates.

That timeline lags more than two months behind some other states such as Texas and Florida. It’s six full weeks behind Washington, which made all seniors ages 65 and older eligible Jan. 18 as teachers must wait until “late winter or early spring.”

Brown’s decision has spawned harsh criticism and deep praise, with some condemning her for keeping the vaccine from the age group most susceptible to severe or deadly COVID-19 infections, while others commend her for taking steps to get young students back in classrooms.

But there’s no guarantee vaccinating teachers sooner will actually lead to a significant return to in-person learning this school year – and in fact many counties do not meet new advisory criteria set by Brown for school reopenings. Final decisions will be made by school districts and teachers’ unions.

Since the first reports of an effective vaccine emerged, the state has been obsessed with crowing about all the "equity" they're going to bring about in distributing the stuff. It's clear that they want to score some big political points as part of the process.

I guess somebody's decided that betwen the teachers' unions and the parents of beleaguered schoolchildren, they're pleasing some voters here. But a lot of the parents aren't comfortable sending their kids to school with other kids from hundreds of unvaccinated households, even if the teachers have had the shot. 

And those kids and teachers who are lucky enough to have senior grandparents and parents alive can't be happy knowing that their aging relatives' isolation sentence is being extended compared to what it would be in other states. California and Washington are vaccinating ordinary senior citizens today, right now, as I type this.

Brown's got less than two years to go before term limits finish her time as governor. I'm sure she, like many others, are coveting Ron Wyden's Senate seat. But she'll always be remembered for how the 'rona vaccine deal went. And so far, it hasn't gone well.