Irish Examiner View: How is this queue dodge different?

The Beacon Hospital Covid-19 vaccination controversy is just another event in a long list of queue-jumping in our health services.

Coronavirus vaccine operations at the Beacon Hospital are to be suspended after it used spare doses to vaccinate teachers at a private school. 

If that well-travelled and supposedly impartial observer, the Man from Mars, arrived today he could not but notice the outrage over the decision by the private, for-profit hospital, The Beacon in Dublin to give unused vaccines to teachers in a private school — coincidentally, the school where The Beacon's CEO pays to have his children educated.

However, if the Man from Mars applied his famously disinterested logic he might well ask what the fuss is really about. Is it about inter-class begrudgery? Or is it, just maybe, provoked by a collective and outraged social conscience? Unlikely, or at least our history suggests not. Or maybe it's just a consequence of entirely-justified and unsettling Covid-19 anxiety. That question would be informed by the realisation that our entire health system is predicated on the kind of paid-for privilege that saw teachers from St Gerard’s private school near Bray, and the staff and managers at Park Academy, which runs private creches used by Beacon staff, vaccinated long before official schedules suggested they might be. This institutionalised queue-jumping is the very epitome of our grossly unfair health system so what's the problem? Why are we all of a sudden outraged?