The Veterans Health Administration Approach to COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation—Balancing Utility and Equity

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) COVID-19 vaccine allocation plan showcases several lessons for government and health care leaders in planning for future pandemics.¹ Many state governments—underresourced and overwhelmed with other COVID-19 demands—have struggled to get COVID-19 vaccines into the arms of their residents.² In contrast, the VHA was able to mobilize early to identify vaccine allocation guidelines and proactively prepare facilities to vaccinate VHA staff and veterans as soon as vaccines were approved under Emergency Use Authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration.^3,4

In August 2020, VHA formed a COVID-19 Vaccine Integrated Project Team, composed of 6 subgroups: communications, distribution, education, measurement, policy, prioritization, and vaccine safety. The National Center for Ethics in Health Care weighed in on the ethical justification for the developed vaccination risk stratification framework, which was informed by, but not identical to, that recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.⁵

Prioritizing who gets early access to a potentially life-saving vaccine weighs heavily on those leaders charged with making such decisions. The ethics of scarce resource allocation and triage protocols that may be necessary in a pandemic are often in tension with the patient-centered clinical ethics that health care practitioners (HCPs) encounter. HCPs require assistance in appreciating the ethical rationale for this shift in focus from the preference of the individual to the common good. The same is true for the risk stratification criteria required when there is not sufficient vaccine for all those who could benefit from immunization. Decisions must be transparent to ensure widespread acceptance and trust in the vaccination process. The ethical reasoning and values that are the basis for allocation criteria must be clearly, compassionately, and consistently communicated to the public, as outlined below. Ethical questions or concerns involve a conflict between core values: one of the central tasks of ethical analysis is to identify the available ethical options to resolve value conflicts. Several ethical frameworks for vaccine allocation are available—each balances and weighs the primary values of equity, dignity, beneficence, and utility slightly differently.⁶

For example, utilitarian ethics looks to produce the most good and avoid the most harm for the greatest number of people. Within this framework, there can be different notions of “good,” for example, saving the most lives, the most life years, the most quality life years, or the lives of those who have more life “innings” ahead. The approach of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) focuses on saving the most lives in combination with avoiding suffering from serious illness, minimizing contagion, and preserving the essential workforce. Frameworks that give primacy to 1 notion of the good (ie, saving the most lives) may deprioritize other beneficial outcomes, such as allowing earlier return to work, school, and leisure activities that many find integral to human flourishing. Other ethical theories and principles may be used to support various allocation frameworks. For example, a pragmatic ethics approach might emphasize the importance of adapting the approach based on the evolving science and innovation surrounding COVID-19. Having more than 1 ethically defensible approach is common; the goal in ethics work is to be open to diversity of thought and reflect on the strength of one’s reasoning in resolving a core values conflict. We identify 2 central tenets of pandemic ethics that inform vaccine allocation.