On Thursday, Canadian sportscaster John Shannon perhaps unwittingly started an important and inevitable conversation when he tweeted to his nearly 150,000 followers this information:

Source confirms that the NHL is planning the private purchase of a COVID vaccine for all constituents involved in the potential upcoming season.

His replies, as they say, were a mess — with many wondering essentially some form of this question:

The backlash was swift enough that Shannon — whether realizing it on his own or prompted by conversations with NHL officials alarmed by the responses — sent a follow-up tweet 90 minutes later:

For clarification ... The NHL is interested in securing vaccine when and if it's available for private purchase. Is it at this point? — no. The league also is adamant they would not jump the line to do so.

The two tweets seem rather incongruous to me and anyone else applying even a tiny bit of logic. If the NHL is not planning to "jump the line," there is no need for a private purchase.

The cost of a vaccine ($19.50 a dose, reportedly, for the Pfizer vaccine already approved in Canada and heading very soon for approval in the United States) is not the issue, particularly for players making millions of dollars a year.

The issue, rather, is quantity. A league full of healthy 20- and 30-somethings in optimal physical condition would be pretty near the back of the line when it comes to getting the vaccine. Any shortcuts that were available to inoculate NHL players, even if the league paid extra for the privilege, would be terrible public health policy.

This clash between public health policy and private privilege is going to be a huge story in the first half of 2021 — in the sports world and beyond.

Any entity scheming to get its hands on a vaccine ahead of schedule, by means that look like preferential treatment, will face an enormous backlash. But many of those entities will be so used to getting their way — either by wielding money, power or both — that they will try anyway and might work harder on the messaging and optics than the actual ethics.

I'm sure the NHL, NBA and eventually MLB, WNBA and even major college programs would love to get the sort of preferential treatment that would prevent the sorts of calendar-wrecking outbreaks that have dominated the latter part of 2020 (and oh, yes, keep players safe).

Whether those athletes ultimately get protected ahead of others who are at a higher risk will tell us a lot about our priorities.

The virus has already done a spectacular job at separating the selfless from the selfish, and we're only just getting started.