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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

#281

Post by acover »

nickpp wrote: post #274
acover wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that price controls create shortages in the long term. The issue is that emergencies are about the short term. I would be very surprised if more money would have helped produce more vaccines. Canada is burning a billion a day to keep everything in lockdown - money does not seem relevant to the current situation. Adding it in just makes everyone pay more for the same limited amount of vaccines.

This emergency does not seem short term. Pandemics generally aren't. There are already talks of new strains and corresponding vaccines in winter. Canada is burning billions because it has decided to prioritize COVID protection above everything else in life. It was clear from the beginning that lockdowns were a bad idea because they weren’t feasible in the long term. Alas, this is the path most of the world's governme…

The supply constraints for the vaccine are short term.

> Canada is burning billions because it has decided to prioritize COVID protection above everything else in life. It was clear from the beginning that lockdowns were a bad idea because they weren’t feasible in the long term. Alas, this is the path most of the world's government chose. We'll be paying the price for years to come...

How does this relate to money being a limiting factor for vaccine production?

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

#282

Post by robin21 »

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.

Why does it matter if what he did was immoral? Many things that are not immoral can have bad outcomes.

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

#283

Post by robin21 »

hpkuarg wrote: post #213
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.

This situation however is more of a small benefit to health for a massive loss in reputation for seemingly allowing corruption.

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

#284

Post by AaronM »

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…

I'm fine with that. The amount of governmental waste trying to keep people from abusing the social services net is likely to cost far more than a small number of people taking advantage of the system.

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

#285

Post by aktuel »

contravariant wrote: post #266
aktuel wrote: post #130

To open a batch you should have an equal amount of people already queued up for the shot. If at the end there are still unused shots for whatever reason I would give the doctor in charge full authority to use those however they see fit as long as they are not selling them for money or other benefits. Sadly the US has now a system where everyone with any responsibilities has zero authority and everyone with authority…

You can hardly expect people to wait around until you have enough people for a single vial. Wasting less than a single vial per day doesn't outweigh the downsides of making it harder to get vaccinated.

No one has to wait around. They get appointments.

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

#286

Post by happytoexplain »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #24
happytoexplain wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the root of a lot of problems. We spend far too much energy making sure "bad people" get what they "deserve" and don't get what they "don't deserve", and put in too little of that same energy in the case of "all people".

And then when we don't spend that energy it's a huge scandal!

I'm not sure what you mean - I'm using quotes because of the dubious definition of justice in the context of shared welfare, but obviously there are plenty of scenarios where more direct consequences for being more directly "bad", for various definitions, makes sense, or is at least unavoidable in a human society.

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

#287

Post by skrowl »

floatingatoll wrote: post #231
BowBun wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would think that given what we’ve done here in the US to the past forty years of workers, they’ve earned a decade off to live on UBI and heal from burnout and develop interests of any sort in anything at all again, before we could even begin to productively analyze their reactions to UBI. They’ve been traumatized and it will take time to heal and I certainly hope that we implement UBI and let them do so. We can aff…

210,000,000 working age adults in the USA * 40,000/year UBI welfare handouts * a decade = 84 TRILLION dollars.

The US govt is currently spending about 2 trillion / year more than they take from their citizens in taxes.

Out of curiosity, what makes you think "We can afford it as a country"?

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

#288

Post by rayiner »

colechristensen wrote: post #61
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.

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…

This is the reason I'm in favor of things like Romney's Family Security Act, which replaces application-based programs with just writing people a check, perhaps based on tax information they have to file once a year anyway.

My sister in law applied for need-based financial aid at a flagship state school. It was so complicated that my wife and I (both corporate attorneys) had to jump on a Zoom call with her and the financial aid office to help sort things out. I can't imagine having to go through all those hoops for housing, etc.

This is a critically pressing problem with Medicaid. The majority of uninsured people in the country are eligible for free insurance under Medicaid, an ACA Bronze plan, or at least subsidies under the ACA: https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/millions-of-uninsured-ameri.... Everyone who files a tax return showing income under the threshold should be automatically registered in Medicaid.

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

#289

Post by mywittyname »

colechristensen wrote: post #209
mywittyname wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why? Sounds like another symptom of a larger problem. Maybe a lack of reasonable opportunities? Or wages are too low to justify working due to child care or commuting costs? Maybe it's the insane cost of healthcare? These people aren't living a comfortable life on meager government benefits. They subsisting on it because the alternative of working for a poverty wage is worse. If you want more people to work, push…

They literally just didn't want to work. They had ample opportunity to work, were technically skilled in a desirable field, and had a job in that field for some time. There wasn't a mitigating circumstance outside of not wanting to work very much. If you have your housing set up for you, the state pays your healthcare and gives you food assistance, and you like cooking simple meals for yourself... well you don't actu…

Did they do the early retirement thing? Like pay off their house ASAP while dumping their salary into 401k and Roth?

I ask because my family member tries something similar, but it only really works because I pay for their housing. It just doesn't seem possible to live on $350/mo otherwise.

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

#290

Post by nickpp »

acover wrote: post #281
nickpp wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This emergency does not seem short term. Pandemics generally aren't. There are already talks of new strains and corresponding vaccines in winter. Canada is burning billions because it has decided to prioritize COVID protection above everything else in life. It was clear from the beginning that lockdowns were a bad idea because they weren’t feasible in the long term. Alas, this is the path most of the world's governme…

The supply constraints for the vaccine are short term. > Canada is burning billions because it has decided to prioritize COVID protection above everything else in life. It was clear from the beginning that lockdowns were a bad idea because they weren’t feasible in the long term. Alas, this is the path most of the world's government chose. We'll be paying the price for years to come... How does this relate to money be…

Do not underestimate the power of human creativity and antreprenorial spirit when correctly motivated. The ability to sell this vaccine at obscene profits would've been extremely motivating.

Now I am not in pharma I don't know how exactly the extra money would've helped, but I know that in pretty much any business more money help with new hires and better people, new machines for production lines, more wild ideas being tested and discarded if not working. Also this is a supply chain issue and they would've been strongly incentivised by more profits. Even those damn syringes missing in Japan and little container bottles to store vaccines in. Finally at macro level better profits would've attracted and incentivised more entrepreneurs with more ideas and imagination. Remember, the very existence of the Moderna and BioNTech companies is due to the free market and private enterprise.

Now on the more very short term an expensive vaccine would've reduce demand by making people consider alternatives and by making sure only people that really need it would get it. It would've avoided aberrations like vaccinating terminal patients or people who are not active and can very well wait for the price to come down wearing masks in the meantime.

But I am afraid that the supply constraint for the vaccine is long term. Because the virus is changing. And our incentives are more aligned with prolonged lockdowns than vaccine production.

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