Good-looking Californians offer doctors tens of thousands of dollars for a coronavirus vaccine – and it’s still not enough to include them on the list.
Other rich and famous West Coast tactics include their personal assistants pastoring doctors daily and making five-figure donations to hospitals, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
“We get hundreds of calls every day,” said Dr. Ehsan Ali, who runs Beverly Hills Concierge Doctor and whose clients are Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande.
“It’s the first time I’ve failed to get something for my patients.”
Dr. Jeff Toll, who runs a private concierge office in Los Angeles – which charges up to $ 25,000 a year for first-class care – said “people are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars.”
Toll, who also has admission privileges at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, remembered how a patient asked him, “If I donated $ 25,000 to Cedars, would it help me line up?”
Another doctor with many Hollywood clients told the Times that celebrities and performers have “their people who literally call me every day.”
“They do not want to wait. They want to know how I can get faster “, said the doctor.
The Golden State has strict rules for who should receive the first blow: health care workers and nursing home residents, then essential workers and those with chronic health conditions first and foremost.
But concierge doctors are already preparing to help their powerful patients get vaccinated as soon as possible, the Times reported.
It compiles long files of patients with a medical history and potential risks COVID-19 and buys expensive freezers with very low temperature, necessary to keep the vax at minus 94 degrees, the report shows.
“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.
Well-connected people could take advantage of vague guidelines and argue that an underlying condition or a top position in a key company should push them to the top of the list, warned Glenn Ellis, a visiting bioethicist and scholar. at Tuskegee University.
“With enough money and influence, you can make a compelling argument about anything,” Ellis told the Times.
But Gov. Gavin Newsom – who made his own gaffe by eating without a mask and indoors at Tony Laundry’s French restaurant – warned that California would be “very aggressive” in making sure the rich and powerful “don’t crowd those who deserve it.” mostly vaccines. “
“Those who think they can cross the line and those who think because they have the resources or the relationships that will allow them to do so … we will also monitor this very, very closely,” Newsom said.