The rapid development of vaccines against COVID-19 represents a huge achievement, and offers hope of ending the global pandemic . At least three COVID-19 vaccines have been approved or are about to be approved for distribution in many countries . However, with very limited initial availability, only a minority of the population will be able to receive vaccines this winter . Urgent decisions will have to be made about who should receive priority for access . Current policy in the UK appears to take the view that those who are most vulnerable to COVID-19 should get the vaccine first . While this is intuitively attractive, we argue that there are other possible values and criteria that need to be considered . These include both intrinsic and instrumental values . The former are numbers of lives saved, years of life saved, quality of the lives saved, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and possibly others including age . Instrumental values include protecting healthcare systems and other broader societal interests, which might require prioritizing key worker status and having dependants . The challenge from an ethical point of view is to strike the right balance among these values . It also depends on effectiveness of different vaccines on different population groups and on modelling around cost-effectiveness of different strategies . It is a mistake to simply assume that prioritizing the most vulnerable is the best strategy . Although that could end up being the best approach, whether it is or not requires careful ethical and empirical analysis.