In the initial weeks of COVID vaccinations, media sources published stories about wealthy and well-connected individuals who devised ways to get vaccinated ahead of their turns there were stories of concierge doctors harangued with phone calls from their A-list clients and of the well-heeled chartering planes to wherever a vaccine was available (Goldhill and St. Local and national news sources helped readers calculate when their turn to get vaccinated would arrive (Boyer 20 Murrell 2021). Indeed, the author of the NYT editorial, Stuart Thompson, explained his motivation to write about this tool as: “The thing that was on my mind in our household was, ‘When is it going to be our turn?’” (quoted in Kavanagh 2020, emphasis added).įrom here, media portrayals of vaccine lines proliferated. After all, the purpose of standing in a line is to get to the front, get your reward, and go. Emmons (2010, 121) has written that “the power of metaphor lies in its ability to evoke narrative,” and this article and image exemplify the narrative evoked by a line-here, vaccination is successful when the individual, the red silhouette marked “you,” is vaccinated. The tool then returned to readers a visual representation of a snaking line wherein the reader’s spot was demarcated with a red silhouette labeled “you” and placed among incrementally marked groups of people (e.g., 250,000 healthcare workers, 67,000 nursing home residents) (see, Fig. The New York Times (NYT) published an interactive editorial that invited readers to “find your place in the vaccine line” (Thompson 2020) readers could calculate their placement by inputting their age, county of residence, profession, and health risks. One of the first published accounts of the vaccine line occurred on December 3, 2020, eight days before the first COVID vaccine was authorized for emergency use. It was during this time of vaccine scarcity and shifting guidelines that the vaccine line began to circulate as a metaphor to describe COVID vaccination. In response to ACIP’s recommendations, all vaccine jurisdictions prioritized healthcare workers and long-term care facility residents but then departed from ACIP’s guidelines, primarily by prioritizing different populations and introducing their own definitions of essential workers (Kates, Tolbert, and Michaud 2021). The committee translated these priorities into a phased distribution plan that prioritized healthcare workers and older adults as well as, incrementally, frontline workers and people with medical conditions, before making vaccines available to the public (Dooling et al. ACIP recognized two guiding priorities for its recommendations: (1) save lives and (2) preserve social functioning. To coordinate the complex process of distributing a new vaccine to the US adult population during a pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) issued recommendations to the states, tribes, and territories charged with vaccine distribution. The vaccine line emerged to describe the phased distribution of COVID vaccines to US residents between December 2020, when the first COVID vaccines were authorized for emergency use, and May 2021, when COVID vaccines were available to the public. This metaphor was short-lived, but analysis of the line metaphor and its related subjectivity of the line jumper are important to understand the contexts that supported this metaphor’s quick uptake and the ongoing implications of popular portrayals of vaccine distribution as a line. This article examines one new vaccine metaphor that emerged to frame COVID vaccination: the vaccine line. When COVID vaccines were first authorized for emergency use in the US in December 2020, attention turned to their allocation and distribution. Since the first cases of the coronavirus were documented in the United States, a COVID vaccine has been framed as the most promising solution to control the virus and contain the pandemic.
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