It is easy to be offended by the idea of the super-rich trying to buy their place in the queue for the Covid-19 vaccine ahead of your granny, and easy to feel a warm glow of satisfaction that they are being rebuffed – all supplies are being held on such a tight rein by the NHS that private clinics can’t get a look in. But would it really be such a bad idea if a handful of very wealthy individuals were allowed to have the vaccine ahead of schedule and raise some very useful cash for the NHS in the process? If we are going to vaccinate our way out of the Covid-19 crisis we are very shortly going to have to be administering millions of doses a week. If, say, a thousand, or even ten thousand of them were devoted to high-paying private patients it would hardly cause a ripple in the roll-out programme, but it could potentially raise many millions for the NHS.
What deserves to be dismissed with a sneer are the sums that London’s wealthy have apparently been offering to jump the queue – offers of £2,000 have been reported. Come off it: there are butlers who earn more than that in a week. In Los Angeles the super-wealthy are reported to be offering $25,000 (£20,000) for an early jab. That’s a bit more like it, but it should just be a starting point in the haggling. What would £100,000 be to a billionaire who is scared of a potentially fatal disease, and who sees a vaccination certificate as a possible route to an early resumption of a jet-setting lifestyle?
Here’s a proposal: why doesn’t the NHS put 100 doses of the Pfizer vaccine aside and auction them to the highest bidders, the lucky winners to be inoculated this week, whatever their age, occupation or other vulnerabilities? Say they did go for £100,000 each – that would be £10 million for starters, enough to pay the annual salary of 100 doctors. Maybe it would be more. There are around 150 billionaires living in Britain: any who stumped up £1 million for their vaccine would be spending less than 0.1 per cent of their wealth – pretty good value if you are afraid of dying. We just wouldn’t know the price of an early vaccine until we tried it out.
If it went well, the NHS could release another 100 doses for auction the following week, or maybe fish around the pool of mere multi-millionaires by making 1,000 doses available and accepting a lower price. Market an advance vaccine programme as part-donation, part self-interest and it could raise all the more. If the NHS didn’t earn enough by the end of January to build a new hospital, I would be very surprised. And still millions of elderly Britons would get their free injections, with negligible delay.
There is one thing preventing this rather agreeable outcome: ideological purity. The NHS remains the one institution – apart, perhaps, from the BBC – which still arouses aggressive communitarian values in many influential people, well beyond the Labour party. Even a Conservative government would balk at wealthy people paying to jump the vaccine queue. But what is ideological purity against the chance to raise useful revenue for the health service at a time when government resources are sorely stretched? The government should give it consideration.
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