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The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

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Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#131

Post by LeifCarrotson »

BeefySwain wrote: post #14
rjbwork wrote: post #5

This is just Kafkaesque. People in a position of authority with blind adherence to rules intended for optimal scenarios. They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able. This whole thing is a logistical clusterfuck and they're trying to throw this dude under the bus. It's obscene.

The really telling part to me is that (seemingly) no one from any of the organizations involved (the hospital and the prosecutors office) will come forward and outright say that what was done was immoral. They are all hiding behind a veneer of "what he did broke the rules and my job is to enforce them", which is about the weakest argument one can make in defense this sort of thing.

The DA who brought the case, Kim Ogg, is an elected official. Top Google result for her name is this campaign page: https://www.kim-ogg.com/. Further down the list is a news article about threatening employees with performance reviews to appear at a food drive for her political benefit.

Had the judge not thrown out this case, she'd have another feather in her cap, another headline for the website: "Kim Ogg puts nepotistic, racist, embezzling doctor behind bars!" Doesn't need to be honest, just needs to sound good.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#132

Post by readthenotes1 »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #92
colechristensen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once involved with a young woman in a homeless program which was entirely defeated by this exact "wrong person" attitude. Get a homeless person an apartment? Great. But it didn't end there, there was a constant stream of documentation requirements, your employer had to, monthly, sign paperwork about how much you earned (advertise to employers that you are/were homeless). The program punished you for making mone…

A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" -- that because the idea of "government handouts" are so enticing, people will cheat the system to get them. There are two issues with this: - "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population…

It also comes from Parkinson's Law: give a full-time employee only one thing to do and it will become a full time job, even if it could be done more expeditiously.

It also comes from systems. They function to expand themselves, not to serve the purpose for which they were created.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#133

Post by whatshisface »

dkural wrote: post #126
colechristensen wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I likewise know someone who intentionally makes as little money as possible in order to take advantage of state support program. Or to be more accurate, makes as much money as possible under the various limits for benefits while living in a comfortable (essentially inherited) situation. This is a person with high education, without any major disability or impediment to working, they just choose not to work because th…

Do you care to substantiate your anecdote?

I'm not sure what they could do to prove it, given that this is a pseudonymous forum and also that they probably aren't interested in revealing too much about their contact.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#134

Post by kryogen1c »

nathancahill wrote: post #3

Spent a long time reading about how vast bureaucratic inefficiencies are created by people worrying that "the wrong person" will benefit from government programs or that someone "undeserving" might get theirs before I do. This falls squarely in that bucket. Tragic.

the real problem is that two core issues exist in opposition: 1) what is the most cost efficient way to solve the problem 2) how people feel about the chosen solution

solving 1 does not automatically solve 2. the slider between anarchocapitalism and state-owned and -operated socialism belongs somewhere in the middle and everyone wants to tug it into a different spot.

if theres anything the internet + social media is teaching us, its that the public has a very, very bad habit of watching one 15 second video of anecdata and vigorously extrapolating, thinking they have arrived at actual data.

all it would take is a couple tweets about some homeless asshole partying in his free government house with his foodstamp money to upset 2 and overthrow 1, even if it was the best solution on the spreadsheet.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#135

Post by ajford »

ivanbakel wrote: post #42
rjbwork wrote: post #5

This is just Kafkaesque. People in a position of authority with blind adherence to rules intended for optimal scenarios. They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able. This whole thing is a logistical clusterfuck and they're trying to throw this dude under the bus. It's obscene.

> They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able. I wouldn't necessarily object to that particular policy. It's a shame to waste perfectly good medicine in a pandemic, but would we feel the same if he had not found anybody vulnerable who was available, and instead ended up vaccinating his own children, who are fit and healthy? What if, instead, he taken…

He did attempt to find the people who should have received it. He just wasn't able to find enough on a tight timeline.

Honestly? As long as he made a good faith effort to distribute the doses he had available, then hell yeah I endorse him vaccinating any warm body available to him, whether it's his family or not.

Now if he took money in exchange? That should be a criminal offense and he should loose his medical license. But if he walked into a grocery store with an hour left and a rich person just happened to get the shot, so be it, as long as no favor was exchanged.

In my opinion this whole mess is, at least in part, a fault of those above him. There should be a standby list with a clear expectancy of urgency. If you get a call at 2am, you either show up or get passed by. Fill it with all the front-line workers in the county or something like that first, then start pulling in the public.

There should be _no_ shortage of people willing to take this, we're just spending so much time worrying about who gets it and not enough time worrying about ensuring that every last dose is effectively used and not wasted.

The current distribution policy does not exist for the equity of society, it puts the most at-risk first. That makes sense, but it shouldn't be the point at which we draw the line. For herd immunity to take effect, 70%+ of the population must be resistant, so a few people getting the vaccine out of order shouldn't cause this much of an outrage when done without malice.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#136

Post by crispyambulance »

zamadatix wrote: post #68
rjbwork wrote: post #5

This is just Kafkaesque. People in a position of authority with blind adherence to rules intended for optimal scenarios. They're literally saying he should have just thrown them away instead of distributing them as best he was able. This whole thing is a logistical clusterfuck and they're trying to throw this dude under the bus. It's obscene.

I think the logic is reasonable but the response is too strong. A doctor driving around vaccinating whoever he can find at their house is clearly not how you want to distribute the vaccine in early December, it's not going to get to the most at risk people as soon as it can and any issues that arise are a huge liability problem unless he can fix it with what's in his car. At the same time not having any plan or proce…

  > it's a story about how the vaccine rollout procedure wasn't good enough and left him in a shitty situation.
Nothing done at this scale and speed is going to be perfect. There's always going to be problems.

I wish that people like the administrator who fired him and the prosecutor who charged him would have used better judgement. This logic is not "reasonable" given how extreme the outcome is.

It takes a lot of steadfast effort to go after someone like that knowing that it's going to be a PR nightmare (except perhaps on HN, where people will argue that it was "logical"). This story seems completely insane to me.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#137

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #92
colechristensen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once involved with a young woman in a homeless program which was entirely defeated by this exact "wrong person" attitude. Get a homeless person an apartment? Great. But it didn't end there, there was a constant stream of documentation requirements, your employer had to, monthly, sign paperwork about how much you earned (advertise to employers that you are/were homeless). The program punished you for making mone…

A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" -- that because the idea of "government handouts" are so enticing, people will cheat the system to get them. There are two issues with this: - "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population…

I think the same idea extends into many other areas of government. The bureaucracy is set up to give the appearance that nobody is taking advantage of the system, and optimizes only for this outcome. So ironically, only those who devote their time to learning how to take advantage of the system are rewarded.

The examples I'm thinking of are government hiring and procurement, where there are all kinds of hoops to jump through to show fairness (God forbid someone gets hired because the hiring manager wants to work with them, or a vendor gets selected because they have built a relationship with those using their services).

In my opinion it's a side-effect of having money to distribute, but having votes as the only forcing function and no economic feedback. So the pressure is to not appear to be giving anyone an advantage, even if it costs in quality of outcomes and bureaucratic overhead.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#138

Post by hntrader »

wycy wrote: post #124

It would be so simple to have a system where everyone can sign up with the local health department to receive extra doses at the end of the day. If there are extra doses, you receive a text message and have 10 minutes to confirm that you'll be there within the hour, otherwise it moves on to the next person. There should be no reason a single dose of this stuff should ever go to waste.

This might be a rare edge case case involving unforseen circumstances. For rare cases like this (presuming that that's true), we probably don't want to set up a whole communication apparatus, since doing so is quite expensive. Instead rely on common-sense ad hoc decision making, just like the doctor in question did.

We just need a small caveat in the rules that only people the doctor doesn't know (either directly or through a mutual acquaintance) are allowed to receive an unplanned shot in this manner, to eliminate the incentive to do it on purpose. As well as some accountability after the fact, depending on the details of the case.

The outcome of this is fairly tragic, I consider this doctor somewhat of a hero and here he is being punished by unthinking bureaucrats. What a shame.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#139

Post by crispyambulance »

treis wrote: post #123
crispyambulance wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds superficially reasonable, but would you get what appears to be a vaccination from some random stranger that shows up with a syringe? He distributed the vaccine to people that knew him (or were in his social network) in the very limited time he had left. The DA who pursued this should be dis-barred.

>That sounds superficially reasonable, but would you get what appears to be a vaccination from some random stranger that shows up with a syringe? With ID, sure. Besides, he's been the medical director of the Covid response for the county since April. His job was to put procedures to handle situations like this in place.

Do you know what the ID of "the medical director of Covid response since April" looks like? I don't and neither do you or the firemen/police he would approach.

Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired

#140

Post by standardUser »

colechristensen wrote: post #120
ascagnel_ wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of this comes from the Reagan-era idea of "welfare queens" -- that because the idea of "government handouts" are so enticing, people will cheat the system to get them. There are two issues with this: - "government handouts" and a reliance on welfare are typically a symptom, not a root cause, of an ailing society -- there are bigger issues at play around wealth and ownership if a large segment of the population…

I likewise know someone who intentionally makes as little money as possible in order to take advantage of state support program. Or to be more accurate, makes as much money as possible under the various limits for benefits while living in a comfortable (essentially inherited) situation. This is a person with high education, without any major disability or impediment to working, they just choose not to work because th…

Fine. I see no problem with some small percentage of people gaming the system as long as the people who actually need help are not denied help (or forced through unreasonable hoops to get help).
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