Incident 91: Frontline workers protest at Stanford after hospital distributed vaccine to administrators

Description: In 2020, Stanford Medical Center's distribution algorithm only designated 7 of 5,000 vaccines to Medical Residents, who are frontline workers regularly exposed to COVID-19.

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Alleged: Stanford Medical Center developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Stanford Medical frontline workers and Stanford Medical residents.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
91
Report Count
5
Incident Date
2020-12-18
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

CSETv0 Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

In 2020, Stanford Medical Center residents protested the Center's distribution of only 7 of the 5,000 COVID-19 vaccines it had received to Medical Residents, who were frontline workers compared to other hospital staff less exposed to COVID-19. Stanford Medical Center employed an algorithm to determine vaccine distribution, and its weight of certain factors alongside the lack on information inputted for Medical Residents shaped the outcome of the distribution plan. The algorithm alledly prioritised age and superiority of position, regardless of physician's physical location at the Stanford Medical Center during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Short Description

In 2020, Stanford Medical Center's distribution algorithm only designated 7 of 5,000 vaccines to Medical Residents, who are frontline workers regularly exposed to COVID-19.

Severity

Minor

Harm Distribution Basis

Age, Ideology, Other:Physician superiority status

Harm Type

Harm to physical health/safety

AI System Description

Stanford Medical Center's algorithm used a rules-based formula for calculating who would get the COVID-19 vaccine first at Stanford. It considers three categories: “employee-based variables,” which have to do with age; “job-based variables”; and guidelines from the California Department of Public Health. For each category, staff received a certain number of points, with a total possible score of 3.48. Presumably, the higher the score, the higher the person’s priority in line.

System Developer

Stanford Medical Center

Sector of Deployment

Human health and social work activities

Relevant AI functions

Cognition

AI Techniques

machine learning

AI Applications

decision support

Location

Stanford Medical Center

Named Entities

Stanford Medical Center

Technology Purveyor

Stanford Medical Center

Beginning Date

12/2020

Ending Date

12/2020

Near Miss

Unclear/unknown

Intent

Accident

Lives Lost

No

Data Inputs

names, age, location, position, job, COVID-19 tests

Frontline workers protest at Stanford after hospital distributed vaccine to administrators
independent.co.uk · 2020

Medical residents and nurses from Stanford Medical Center held a protest on Friday following the hospital choosing to vaccinate some staff members who don’t interact with coronavirus patients over other frontline workers.

Video footage from…

Only Seven of Stanford’s First 5,000 Vaccines Were Designated for Medical Residents
propublica.org · 2020

Update, Dec. 18, 2020: This story has been updated to add comments from Stanford Medicine.

Stanford Medicine residents who work in close contact with COVID-19 patients were left out of the first wave of staff members for the new Pfizer vacc…

Stanford apologizes for coronavirus vaccine plan that left out many front-line doctors
washingtonpost.com · 2020

Stanford Health Care apologized Friday for a plan that left nearly all of its young front-line doctors out of the first round of coronavirus vaccinations. The Palo Alto, Calif., medical center promised an immediate fix that would move the p…

Stanford algorithm decided to vaccinate only seven of its frontline COVID-19 workers, out of 5,000 doses
theverge.com · 2020

An algorithm determining which Stanford Medicine employees would receive its 5,000 initial doses of the COVID-19 vaccine included just seven medical residents / fellows on the list, according to a December 17th letter sent from Stanford Med…

This is the Stanford vaccine algorithm that left out frontline doctors
technologyreview.com · 2020

When resident physicians at Stanford Medical Center—many of whom work on the front lines of the covid-19 pandemic—found out that only seven out of over 1,300 of them had been prioritized for the first 5,000 doses of the covid vaccine, they …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.