They offer tens of thousands of dollars in cash, have their personal assistants keep doctors every day, and ask if a five-figure donation to a hospital will help them get up.
The COVID-19 vaccine is here – so are the rich people who want it first.
“We get hundreds of calls every day,” said Dr. Ehsan Ali, who leads Beverly Hills Concierge Doctor. Her clients, including Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber, pay between $ 2,000 and $ 10,000 a year for personalized care. “It’s the first time I’ve failed to get something for my patients.”
With the first doses in small quantities, California established a strict order of vaccination based on need and risk: health care workers and nursing home residents, then essential workers and those with chronic health conditions, and then, finally, everyone else.
But for those with power, money and influence, the rules can always be bent. California’s stern message about serving the needy has not stopped the rich from trying to jump in front of teachers, farm workers and firefighters.
Dr. Jeff Toll, who has admission privileges at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, one of the first hospitals to store the vaccine, recalled a patient who asked, “If I donate $ 25,000 to Cedars, would that help me Do I stand in line? ” I said no.
Surveillance dogs have warned that the initial lack of the COVID-19 vaccine could create a thriving black market, especially if well-connected people in the medical industry eliminate a few doses here and there for friends, family or the largest bidder.
But getting earlier access to photography may not require even an in-room business. Some wealthy patients may get the photos earlier than an average person because they are members of exclusive healthcare groups that provide a type of high-quality primary care that most Americans cannot afford.
These patients are already on waiting lists with concierge doctors who charge up to $ 25,000 a year for non-stop access to first-class care, which includes working to vaccinate their clients as soon as they are available.
Concierge practices send frantic, repeated phone calls from well-trained clients and their assistants. They are busy assembling long files of patients with a medical history and potential COVID-19 risks.
And they provide expensive, low-temperature freezers that are few to store the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, which must be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit.
Doctors in boutique offices say they will follow public health guidelines to determine who gets priority. But being on a waiting list at a cabinet that has special freezers and other high-quality resources means you’re already close to the front of the line once the supply opens.
Some boutique practices have already been applied to California health officials for approval for vaccine storage and administration at a time when the primary care physician has little idea when and how their patients will have access to photos.
“As soon as we heard about the vaccine coming on the market, we started looking for freezers,” said Andrew Olanow, co-founder of Sollis Health, a concierge firm with clinics in New York, Hamptons and Beverly Hills.
Six weeks ago, Sollis Health placed an order for six ultra-low temperature freezers at about $ 5,000 each. It’s coming next month.
After Sollis reserved his freezers, he said, several “larger government orders” absorbed much of the reserve, which means longer waiting times for clinics that only place orders now.
Representatives of Pfizer and Moderna, whose vaccine is expected to be approved this week, said doctors and private citizens could not yet buy doses from them. The US government controls the allocation of doses to all 50 states.
Until the vaccine is available to non-government buyers, janitors are in an unusual position to tell their demanding patients that they will only have to wait for the time being.
That didn’t stop patients from trying.
“People are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars,” said Toll, a doctor who admits privileges at Cedars-Sinai. His practice as a private concierge in Los Angeles starts at $ 5,000 a year and can go up to $ 25,000.
Doctors who send such requests, he said, must be comfortable saying “no” to rich and strong people, similar to when they ask for inappropriate drugs. Toll tells patients that those designated as most at risk by public health officials should receive it first.
“We are governed by the Hippocratic oath, the responsibility to provide care to those most in need,” said Dr. Abe Malkin, founder of Concierge MD LA, a home medical service that charges up to $ 750 a month. But at the same time, there will obviously be gray areas based on the individual needs of patients.
The guidelines that give priority to people working in key industries, who have underlying health conditions or who are over 65 years of age are massive gray areas. In California alone, nearly 12 million people – two-thirds of the state’s workforce – work in key industries.
This ambiguity creates opportunities for well-connected people to argue that an underlying health condition or a C-level position in a key company should push them to the front of the line, said Glenn Ellis, a bioethicist and researcher at Tuskegee University.
“With enough money and influence, you can make a compelling argument about anything,” Ellis said. But unlike lobbying for a better meal at a restaurant or a better place at a Broadway show, he said, administering a dose of a vaccine to an essential worker could cost someone their health or life.
The model is familiar in a state where Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley executives are used to making their way. Governor Gavin Newsom, who made his own blunder by eating without a mask at The French Laundry in Napa Valley, warned that California will be “very aggressive, making sure that those with means, those with influence, do not crowd those who worth the vaccines. “
“Those who believe they can cross the line and those who believe they have the resources or the relationships that will allow them to do so … we will monitor this very, very closely,” Newsom said.
Alison Bateman-House, an assistant professor of medical ethics at NYU, said not everyone makes the connections for a hit does so out of purely selfish motivation. Some people “are not an absolute priority for vaccination, but they have what they consider to be an urgent need,” she said, including the families of immunocompromised relatives who might otherwise wait months to be immunized.
“Every system has a weak link somewhere, and I’m sure someone will find it and someone will exploit it,” Bateman-House said. “The question is: where will this weak link be and how quickly will it be identified and stopped?”
Taryn Vian, a health care anti-corruption expert who teaches at the University of San Francisco, said strong people could gain early access to the vaccine not through bribery or coercion, but through more subtle means, such as asking friends. equally strong.
A friend of the leader of a pharmaceutical company, medical distributor, hospital, or nursing home may ask if additional doses are available, and the leader may ask their assistant to see if they can help. The assistant could then interpret the request as a request to divert a dose, Vian explained.
“VIP treatment is very common” in the medical industry, Vian said.
That’s already happening in California, doctors say, especially in the entertainment world. The stars and directors do not judge their doctors themselves, but train their assistants to find out how they can get better treatment.
“Their people literally call me every day,” said a doctor who asked for anonymity to speak honestly about their clients, many of whom work in Hollywood. “They do not want to wait. They want to know how I can get it faster. ”