The care home residents are excluded for now, because of the logistics of splitting the batches of 975 individual phials. They'll be vaccinated by NHS staff when the MRHA says it's safe.
In a way there's some logic to it, because care home residents don't leave the building - the staff are the people who bring the virus in from outside. Some work in more than one care home, too.
edit - I agree with you that if I was a doctor or nurse working in a hospital, I'd feel very unhappy about it.
Yeah it seems a strange one to me. We can all agree there's geographic differences in these countries which influence distribution methods, storage facilities vary, the proportion of people in different high-risk settings vary, etc. But it's difficult to know how they could differ enough on that one level. The CDC published the evidence they used to vote on the decision of who to prioritise
here, and they evaluated it on three key dimensions: science, implementation and ethics.
There was a discussion about who to prioritise out of the essential workers, adults with high risk conditions, and adults over 65 and the arguments for that aren't so clear-cut, but they had already taken it for granted that health care professionals were first up because it's easier, more effective and more just. One thing that does change the equation is whether the vaccine blocks infection or just disease. Theoretically if this vaccine doesn't block infection then it significantly weakens the argument for healthcare professionals as one key benefit of that is limiting in-hospital transmission.
Even still, it seems an obvious choice. Even just for morale. They've dealt with the worst of it this year and somehow they're supposed to be ok with being overlooked once more? Seems very dangerous. Then again, maybe they did get feedback from the medical profession that a lot of them didn't want to be first up, and more of the care home folks did? We do have folks in here that said their partners in healthcare had already said they were going to reject the 1st round of vaccinations. If a significant proportion of HCPs did so at the beginning it could have adverse effects in the long run. Similarly dramatically reducing the most severe effects in care homes could be the clearest evidence to the wider population that this brings huge benefits. The care home community did get the worst treatment at the beginning, after all. The UK were particularly bad on that one. Compensating for that isn't such a bad thing.