---
title: "Scientists: We Should Vaccinate Social Butterflies Before the Vulnerable"
description: "Scientists have a counterintuitive approach to distributing limited COVID-19 vaccines: Inoculate the superspreaders who'd otherwise keep infecting others."
date: "2020-11-10"
modified: "2020-11-10"
authors:
  - name: "Dan Robitzski"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/danrobitzski"
url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/vaccinate-social-butterflies-before-vulnerable"
categories:
  - "Health & Medicine"
  - "Medical"
  - "Pathogens"
  - "Viruses"
tags:
  - "contact-tracing"
  - "coronavirus"
  - "covid19"
  - "vaccine"
---

# Scientists: We Should Vaccinate Social Butterflies Before the Vulnerable

![Scientists have a counterintuitive approach to distributing limited COVID-19 vaccines: Inoculate the superspreaders who'd otherwise keep infecting others.](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/vaccinate-social-butterflies-before-vulnerable.jpg>)
*\<em\>Image: Image via Pxfuel\</em\>*

When a [safe and effective vaccine](<https://futurism.com/neoscope/pfizer-claims-covid19-vaccine-is-90-percent-effective>) for COVID-19 finally becomes available to the public, it's almost guaranteed that supplies will initially be limited.

Therefore, officials will need to make tough calls about who to inoculate against the coronavirus first, with at-risk groups and frontline workers often being named as frontrunners. But, *[Wired reports](<https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-vaccine-super-spreaders/>)*, some experts argue that a different group should cut the line and get the first doses of the vaccine: the very same social butterfly superspreaders responsible for new outbreaks and infections.

The argument, according to *Wired*, is that inoculating the most flagrant violators of distancing and quarantine protocols, regardless of whether it's by choice or the necessity of their jobs, would more directly combat the coronavirus pandemic based on how it's actually spread. Because it's an unfortunate reality that older people tend to have fewer interpersonal connections, *Wired* reports that prioritizing them in a vaccination program would [protect those individuals](<https://futurism.com/neoscope/covid-vaccine-works-young-old-closed-meeting>) but do little else to stop the spread in the meantime.

Rather than assuming that transmission is a randomized phenomenon, which experts tell *Wired* is unrealistic, vaccinating superspreaders would nip new infections in the bud.

"If you do this," Bar-Ilan University physicist Shlomo Havlin told *Wired*, "you reduce the number of units that you need to immunize by a factor of three or four."

In a real-world setting, this could happen through contact tracing methods. Or, *Wired* notes, by simply asking people to name an acquaintance, a process that ultimately arrives at the most connected people. Those folks, by extension, are likelier to have more human contact and spread the virus.

## Author
Dan Robitzki is a senior reporter for Futurism, where he likes to cover AI, tech ethics, and medicine. He spends his extra time fencing and streaming games from Los Angeles, California.

### Author social links  
[Twitter](<https://x.com/danrobitzski>)