Fastest way to COVID-19 immunity? Grease palms

Best tactic for eluding COVID-19? Get rich.

Change your address to Palm Beach or Fisher Island or another exclusive community unsullied by desperate peasants jostling for vaccinations.

Hang out at the country club with a health care magnate. Buy him a drink. Let him win a golf game. Pass on insider stock tips.

Subscribe to a pricy concierge medical service. Slip the doc something extra, a gratuity large enough to grease his scruples.

Donate big bucks to a hospital fundraiser. Hint that a discreet jab in the arm might inspire more such philanthropy.

Do what our betters do. By-pass the rabble, long lines, hours-long waits (if you can manage to snag an appointment). Do what the rich do. Flash your AmEx black card and assign your personal assistant to work out the details ( just not on a Tuesday, which conflicts with tennis lessons). Ain’t that the Florida way?

Not that this is news hereabouts. Reporting that Florida’s rich and powerful have jumped the line, first for COVID testing, then for vaccinations, has about as much shock value as suggesting Donald Trump suffers narcissistic tendencies. Us commoners, desperately trying to procure an appointment on a perpetually dysfunctional health department website, are used to this stuff. We’ve become just another variation of carousers stuck in a long line outside a South Beach night club, watching the doorman unhook his velvet rope to allow the special people in ahead of us nobodies.

The state’s unofficial motto has long been: “Privilege are us.” Especially when it comes to medical considerations. Florida railroad and hotel entrepreneur Henry Flagler set the precedent in 1896, when he jettisoned an inconvenient second wife to make room for her replacement by convincing a well-compensated doctor to have her committed. Flagler then persuaded the Florida Legislature to legalize divorce, but only after a medical consultant found the spouse insane. Ten days after his divorce, the 71-year-old Flagler married his 36-yearold third wife. (Henry’s divorce law was repealed in 1905.)

All these years later, with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the rich remain different from you and me. And healthier. Especially during a pandemic.

Back in April, when getting a COVID-19 test was like finding a kidney donor, Fisher Island purchased coronavirus antibody tests for the 800 families residing on the private, wildly affluent island, accessible only by ferry (not for the likes of you). With enough extra doses to accommodate the various maids, cooks and gardeners allowed to make the crossing.

“I cannot reconcile the shoeless, maskless, hungry children we fed today with this headline,” Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools tweeted after the Miami Herald reported the Fisher Island story.

Superintendent Carvalho must have forgotten that he lives in Florida.

Last month, the city of Palm Beach, speaking of superrich enclaves, obtained its own exclusive vaccine supply, allowing the town’s residents to avoid the unseemly and often futile struggle with the health department bureaucracy experienced by folks huddled along the west bank of Lake Worth.

West Palm Beach suffered its own vaccine outrage this week when the Washington Post discovered that wealthy donors and board members of the luxurious MorseLife nursing home were vaccinated along with its elderly patients.

The Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday that homeowners in a Hernando County gated community with the appropriately highfalutin name Wellington at Seven Hills had also copped its own vaccination supply.

Of course, politicians, under the pretense of “setting an example,” also got their shots well ahead of their constituents with photographers there to capture the magic moment. Their numbers included pols who had downplayed the seriousness of the virus and had flouted the CDC’s mask and social distancing guidelines.

And you might have noticed that when someone with juice, like say Rudy Giuliani (speaking of guideline flouters) contracts COVID-19, his treatment regime is relatively gaudy. Rudy, who was admitted to a hospital despite suffering only mild symptoms, was pumped up with cutting-edge drugs and was out in three days. (Though he has since been dogged by hallucinations of voting transgressions.)

Such inequities might shock folks in the heartland, but this is Florida where the same formula for fast access to a life-saving vaccine also applies to eliminating the wait for a table at Joe’s Stone Crab.

Money may not buy you happiness, but enough of it, slipped into the palm of a doc or maître d’, gets you first dibs on a COVID vaccination. And a heap of crab claws.