Weirder still, one vaccine in particular—from Pfizer—has somehow become the cool vaccine, as well as the vaccine for the rich and stylish. Slate’s Heather Schwedel recently discussed the “Pfizer superiority complex” at length. As one source told her: “One of my cousins got Moderna, and I was like, ‘That’s OK. We need a strong middle class.’” On Twitter, the vaccinated are changing their usernames to reflect their new personal identities: There are Pfizer Princesses and Pfizer Floozies and Pfizer Pfairies and at least one Portrait of a Lady on Pfizer. “Pfizer is what was available when I signed up,” Jagger Blaec, a 33-year-old podcast host told me, “but it’s no coincidence every baddie I know has Pfizer and not Moderna.” Isn’t it a coincidence, though?... Pfizer elitism seems to have originated on TikTok, where the vaccine hierarchy has been most concretely outlined. I wondered if it might have something to do with the particulars of that platform, so I reached out to Shauna Pomerantz, a TikTok scholar and an associate professor at Brock University, in Ontario. She suggested a much simpler explanation: The idea of a rich-hot-bougie-elite-status vaccine comes out of American culture, she said, in which everything is extremely competitive and organized around “winners and losers rather than support and kindness.” Yikes. Certainly some TikTok clips are more explicit than others about the “winners and losers,” and what having a “rich” vaccine really means. One video in my feed, soundtracked by Nicki Minaj rapping about a “bum-ass” person who can’t afford their rent, posited that there is no rivalry between Moderna and Pfizer—rather, “it’s us vs. Johnson & Johnson.” There is some truth, or perceived truth, to this formulation—not just because of the clear differences between the mRNA vaccines and other options, but also because these vaccines have been distributed to different people. The CDC reported last week that many public-health departments have been using Johnson & Johnson specifically for homeless people, as well as those who are homebound or incarcerated. Meanwhile, public-health leaders have struggled to avoid portraying the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is also targeted to rural and migrant populations, as a second-class option.