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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

#211

Post by ajford »

theluketaylor wrote: post #190
ajford wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 licen…

> 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 I agree, but I think if I were in the position of having an extra dose that needed a warm body I'd try to find someone outside my family to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Oh, I agree. But if it comes down to dropping it in the trash or giving it to his family? In that case, I vote administering the vaccine.

At no point should this vaccine be wasted, people have literally given their lives to save others during this pandemic. Throwing away doses because it looks improper is an insult and a disservice to those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice in the service of others.

It's not a popular opinion, but I think anyone who's administering the vaccine should have their immediate family added to the standby list anyways, if not placed in the current phase.

Eliminate the temptation for these people to want to go outside the normal channels to protect your family, and you eliminate the risk of impropriety.

That's not to say it shouldn't be rationed and planned so the high-risk populous suffers though. It's ultimately a contentious line we have to walk, since supply is limited and demand is high, though not as geospatially dense as we'd like in all cases. It makes efficient delivery to those in rural or less well served areas much harder, which brings about intended and unintended inequalities to the front.

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

#212

Post by Tostino »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #166
TeaDrunk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the parent stating too many people are doing exactly what you're proposing, which is protesting that services are being provided to people who don't deserve it? (Separating children into deserving and undeserving categories of educational attention seems that way to me...)

Not separating into inherently deserving and undeserving, but those who desire a good education and those who do not. There are students in poor schools who push to become learned in spite of obstacles. Think Ben Carson for an example. And there are those who have tons of resources and opportunities but fail to use them, those who don't care about learning something. I knew quite a few of the former, people who would…

And this is how we get a permanent underclass. I don't disagree with the overall thought that we should spend effort on people who appreciate and care for that effort to be spent. I just think that in practice, the effects would be disastrous.

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

#213

Post by hpkuarg »

ls612 wrote: post #48

This just goes to show how people are. They don’t want others to benefit if they don’t also benefit. They would rather more people get sick and die than someone get a shot before their turn. So much about politics can he explained by looking at people this way.

A lot of people have a zero-sum mindset about everything.

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

#214

Post by ryandrake »

ip26 wrote: post #199
ironmagma wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That $36B is a drop in the bucket on the scale of a country. It's 25% of Jeff Bezos's net worth. How many $B spent on enforcement is it worth to reduce that to, say, $30B?

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

#215

Post by mumblemumble »

clairity wrote: post #202
mumblemumble wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that assistance programs are rent seeking. It's that the assistance programs, as they're structured, are a honey pot for rent seeking. A program that micro-manages what people can put on their table at home invites lobbying to influence those rules for one's own financial gain. It's an example of how pearl-clutching attitudes - in this case, fears, based on deeply entrenched moralistic notions about less-wea…

yes, i understand your point, but again, that's literally a rounding error compared to other, much larger rent-seeking behaviors.

Sure. But that challenge smells of whataboutism.

And it's also looking at the finger rather than where it's pointing. I could just as easily have picked on health care, for example, or housing assistance programs. But I'm not trying to write a book, here.

I think the more interesting phenomenon here is that seeing the negative consequences of a largely fiscally conservative cause is bringing fiscal conservative thought leaders to the point of putting their support behind a traditionally socialist cause.

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

#216

Post by fitzie »

nickpp wrote: post #198

Over 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…

the flu vaccine is delivered annually by experts. now they are creating a whole new vaccine distribution system run by people who have never done it before. the politicians are celebrating their megasites as if that is suppose to impress us. I have no doubt if the money was ever counted that we're spending ten times more per shot for covid then we do for influenza, just on the distribution.

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

#217

Post by vlovich123 »

smnrchrds wrote: post #100
vlovich123 wrote: post #22

> Late last month, a judge dismissed the charge as groundless, after which the local district attorney vowed to present the matter to a grand jury Considering that grand juries would indict a ham sandwhich, this seems like the prosecutor is reaching just to prolong the process and pain this doctor is going through. Even assuming the best case argument for the prosecutor that he did “steal it”, he vaccinated 10 people…

> Considering that grand juries would indict a ham sandwhich I am not American. When I hear about grand juries in American media, it is usually when they refuse to indict in a case of brutality or killing by police officers, even though there is clear evidence about the incident. It seems that grand juries never indict anyone, not the other way around. Where do grand juries' biases lie in reality?

Grand juries give you the result the prosecutor wants. The ham sandwich tounge-in-cheek joke is that usually the prosecutor wants to indict, otherwise why would they bother going to a grand jury. For police officer involved brutality/killings, it's usually the opposite. The prosecutor doesn't want to bring the case (since their office needs to work with cops to prosecute civilians) but there's political pressure from the community, so the prosecutor brings the case to the grand jury & scuttles the indictment.

A huge improvement is probably actually to just remove the grand jury. That way prosecutors can't hide behind the "well I wanted to indict but the grand jury didn't let me" while removing the guilty by association act of "well a jury clearly thought the indictment had merit".

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

#218

Post by TeaDrunk »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #166
TeaDrunk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the parent stating too many people are doing exactly what you're proposing, which is protesting that services are being provided to people who don't deserve it? (Separating children into deserving and undeserving categories of educational attention seems that way to me...)

Not separating into inherently deserving and undeserving, but those who desire a good education and those who do not. There are students in poor schools who push to become learned in spite of obstacles. Think Ben Carson for an example. And there are those who have tons of resources and opportunities but fail to use them, those who don't care about learning something. I knew quite a few of the former, people who would…

My argument is that all children inherently want to learn. All children desire a good education, defined as being in a supportive environment where their curiosities can be wholly quenched and allowed to thrive. There's no child that's born not giving a flying fuck about anything, only children who don't have that curiosity beaten out of them by the world. Labeling literally children as irredeemable only adds to their beating.

Why can't we have summer schools and before/after-school tutoring?

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

#219

Post by ryandrake »

Tostino wrote: post #212
da_big_ghey wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not separating into inherently deserving and undeserving, but those who desire a good education and those who do not. There are students in poor schools who push to become learned in spite of obstacles. Think Ben Carson for an example. And there are those who have tons of resources and opportunities but fail to use them, those who don't care about learning something. I knew quite a few of the former, people who would…

And this is how we get a permanent underclass. I don't disagree with the overall thought that we should spend effort on people who appreciate and care for that effort to be spent. I just think that in practice, the effects would be disastrous.

Yea, pay now (education) or pay later (prison / public assistance). You can't just say, well this person doesn't care or is hopeless so not my problem!

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

#220

Post by spion »

BowBun wrote: post #203
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'm generally for social welfare programs, however the idea of "welfare queens (and kings)" is NOT fiction. I come from Belgium which has this problem quite notoriously. It is quite common for people to be abusing the social programs to stay unemployed and make more income than blue-collar workers. Like you allude to, I think we need to look more deeply to address this issue - why are people satisfied doing nothing a…

UBI or progressive negative tax should solve this problem, no? (The idea is that a job always gets you more money than the base)
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