Good-heeled 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 his personal assistants giving doctors daily and offering five-figure donations to hospitals, The Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
“We get hundreds of calls every day,” said Dr. Ehsan Ali, who runs the Beverly Hills concierge service and has among her clients Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande.
“It’s the first time I haven’t achieved anything 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, recalled how a patient asked him, “If I give $ 25,000 to Cedars, would that help me get online?”
Another doctor with many Hollywood clients told the Times that celebrities and executives make “their people literally call me every day.”
“They do not want to wait. They want to know how to get there faster, ”said the doctor.
The Golden State has strict rules for who should receive the shot first: health workers and residents in residences, and then essential workers and those with chronic illnesses first and foremost.
But concierge doctors are already preparing to help their powerful patients get vaccinated as soon as possible, the Times reported.
They are compiling long files of patients with a medical history and possible risks of COVID-19 and are buying expensive, ultra-low-temperature freezers to keep the vax at minus 94 degrees, according to the report.
“As soon as we learned the vaccine was coming to market, we started looking for freezers,” said Andrew Olanow, co-founder of Sollis Health, a concierge office with clinics in New York, the Hamptons and Beverly Hills.
Well-connected people could take advantage of vague guidelines and argue that an underlying condition or top position in an essential company should lead them to the top of the list, warned Glenn Ellis, a bioethicist and visiting scholar at Tuskegee University.
“With enough money and influence, you can argue convincingly about anything,” Ellis told the Times.
But Gov. Gavin Newsom, who made his own gaffe, eating without a mask and indoors at the tuna restaurant French Laundry, has warned that California will be “very aggressive” in making the rich and the powerful. ” do not eliminate those who deserve vaccines the most. “
“Those who think they can get ahead of the line and those who think because they have resources or have relationships that will allow them to do so … we will also monitor it very, very closely,” Newsom said.