Similar incident from San Jose last month where an entire hospital was denied vaccines for giving it to the wrong people (in this case, teachers)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/abc7news.com/amp/good-samaritan...
The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
191–200 of 369 posts
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 nepo…
I am a Houstonian and absolutely hate Ogg. She bills herself as the "most progressive DA" and therefore prosecutes/does not prosecute certain things based on their political appearance. That is not what a DA should be doing, and she is the embodiment of all that is wrong with the "progressive" left these days.
not to mention this is an insanely anti-progressive prosecution once you dig into the details. just dumb.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and vast ...* [citation needed] Fraud does happen. But it doesn't happen enough for it to be worth setting up an entire bureaucracy to prevent it. Especially if that bureaucracy undermines the value of the program for everyone who's faithfully making use of the services in the intended manner. More and more, it seems that keeping social welfare programs inefficient is benefiting the people who want to remove them e…
I could be wrong, but it is possible that fraud is low because of the bureaucracy
A compelling case to increase bureaucracy made here (from 2011): https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril-2011/more-...
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? If he'd made an honest attempt at offering it to vulnerable people first and couldn't find any takers, then I'd be fine with him giving it to his healthy children. > What if, instead, he taken the…
>I think it's unfair to offer these as the comparisons to what he actually did They're not comparisons. They are hypotheticals, intended to explore the range of possibilities that people would allow or oppose. If people want to argue that the doctor was right to go out and distribute the vaccine ad-hoc, I think they should consider not just the actual result, but also counterfactuals, and whether in those counterfact…
> If people want to argue that the doctor was right to go out and distribute the vaccine ad-hoc, I think they should consider not just the actual result, but also counterfactuals, and whether in those counterfactual cases the actions would still be "justified". By returning to the real events, you're avoiding that consideration.
I agree that we must consider counterfactuals, but we can still only judge him by his actions, not hypothetical scenarios. Considering counterfactuals should help guide policy, not punishment.
> I did not mean "equity" in terms of "equitable racial distribution". I meant "equity" in the nebulous way of "fairness".
So how do we determine a particular list of recipients was "equitable" or not? While I agree with the idea that equity should mean fairness, I would offer that unfortunately in America that notion begins and ends with "equitable racial distribution".
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#195Earlier 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…
The District Attorney who tried to prosecute Dr. Gokal, Kim Ogg [1], is a racial justice & equity-fetishizing Democrat.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I generally support universal basic income if it could replace the US safety net. Currently we spend more than it would take to eliminate poverty if we just gave it away. But the beauracratic machine just destroys so much wealth.
Do you have numbers? How much do we spend eliminating poverty? And how much would we spend on universal income? Assuming 200 million adults get universal income, that would cost $1 trillion per $5,000 of income. But $5000 hardly gets you out of poverty.
I suppose the question is does it mean people don't flock them to em super expensive overcrowded cities if they get UBI. I don't have an answer to it personally.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fraud is real, and vast, and if it creeps in it undermines the whole thing. What's the alternative?
Billions in unemployment fraud last year means billions in government services that will not b we going to help people that really desperately need help.
The fraud is entirely due to the structural problems (like hard cut offs) of these programs.
(I mean entirely, because if there are people living comfortably on the program without no motivation to do anything else in their life, then a) maybe that's okay, b) maybe that's a mental health issue [and fixing it might cost a lot more], c) at some point the fraud becomes so encompassing, that it's not the program's fault, but it's someone literally robbing taxpayers via whatever means they can. Furthermore any social program that only addresses and takes into account some narrow slice of people's life problems will be easily gameable, so let's have comprehensive integrated programs. Yes, they are hard, but it's not like putting people on the moon is that much easier.)
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#198Over and over again we re-learn that the single proven way to distribute scarce resources is the free market. Anything else we tried led to abuses, aberrations, waste and in the end fewer people gaining access to that resource.
I have seen this in the planned economy I grew up in, which was unable to provide even toilet paper to its people - but it was ok, because we didn’t have any food either.
Our blindness to the simplicity, obviousness and logic of the market laws and our obsession with the forced, unnatural "fairness" and "equality" make us relearn this lesson the hard way, by paying the price. Unfortunately this time the price is in lives.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just selfishness, I think we've run into something fundamentally unintuitive for people's lower brain. For much of human history, shutting out cheats & freeloaders was an important part of making good use of a resource. These days, we have hit a point where the bureaucratic overhead of shutting them out can become more expensive than just letting them in. That's not intuitive for people.
The problem with this take is that it’s more useful than just to preserve a resource. By allowing people to get away with fraud you are encouraging people to do it again, including ways that transcend whatever system that fraud was originally within. I don’t actually know that chasing pranksters has ever been an efficient use of time, but someone should chase them if we expect the boundaries of normal operation to be…
Right, the $36B lost to unemployment fraud (10% of payments) in the past 12 months definitely illustrates that some amount of guardrails are still appropriate. There is an optimum level somewhere in between where the sum total of losses & overhead together are minimized.
Re: The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired
#200This is a complex issue. Ideally we would have a much better organized rollout avoiding these scenarios. I don't think we ever want individual physicians using their own contacts list to find candidates regardless of good intention, it just opens the door up too much abuse. I don't think the penalty matches the crime, certainly not a criminal prosecution.
Dude. "This overall situation isn't ideal from my perspective" is really, REALLY not equivalent to "this particular person committed a crime".
If it's night time and you have six hours to administer the doses, you have to administer them in six hours. To someone you can contact in six hours. At night.
Your position just boils down to "I'd rather let people die than be open to a bureaucratic exception in a desperate emergency situation in the middle of a pandemic."
It's monstrous, quite frankly. You should reconsider.