You could imagine a scenario where you have two people who are otherwise exactly the same except for vaccination, where you could think about vaccination as a tiebreaker. But it’s only in your imagination that you would have that scenario come up, and we already ration care in general in every health system everywhere, based on lots of different principles.

I also think it is unfair [to use vaccination status as the deciding factor], especially when you don’t know why that person wasn’t vaccinated. There are obviously people, like the picture in our mind — which I think is in many ways encouraged by different media portrayals and by people who enjoy fostering malice towards one another in our nation — the picture of someone who gets all their health information from their Aunt Gertrude on Facebook and is posting memes about [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony] Fauci being part of the Illuminati and whatnot.

But there are lots of different reasons people have chosen not to get vaccinated. I would say probably the biggest number I have encountered are people who got COVID and are hesitant about getting the vaccine because they’re hesitant about reactions, or they know someone who had a bad reaction, or maybe they have a history of bad reactions. So for them, it’s a matter of prudential judgment, but you can’t look at that history when you’re in the hypothetical ICU, you have one ventilator and two patients in front of you. Looking at someone’s vaccination status, you can’t say, “Oh, well, this person was vaccinated. They get the tube. This person was not vaccinated. They don’t.”