>everyone online has access to the oed

yes, this is absolutely true... for a mere $550 dollar-bucks (US) per annum for an individual subscriber. a slightly better deal can be had through gratis use of a proxy server via a publicly funded network subscriber, such as your local library.

meanwhile (while everyone rushes to sign up), here's some history on 'to vet' culled from the virtual pages of OED2:

vet first shows up as a verb ca. 1891 and very soon gets applied in a general way (to a person) in 1898. but it was Kipling, in 1904, who gets credit for moving on from medical examination to investigation of a person's suitability:

These are our crowd.... They've been vetted, an' we're putting 'em through their paces.