Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nyti.ms

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 369 posts

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

#341

Post by zamadatix »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #291
zamadatix wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wasting a dose doesn't necessarily imply driving around and sticking the first person that says yes at the spot they happen to be though. e.g. standard policy could be to not open the next batch of 10 until certain conditions are met, call people on tomorrows list until you get 9 that can show up in the next 6 hours, or any other planned action. These are superior options because: 1) everything still happens in a…

I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but I think it's a delicate balance. If two people cancel one morning because, I don't know, a storm knocked down a bunch of trees in their area, and you've tried your future appointments list, do you now have to phone the other six patients and ask them to reschedule too? Or do you have a nurse go out and find two people off the street who want a COVID vaccine, and brin…

Vaccine appointments are booked weeks out (I waited about 3 weeks after scheduling mine and I scheduled to get it the first available day at a 7 am appointment that was left open), someone further down on the list will answer and be available that afternoon. If for some reason this realization happens after the last person walks in the door for the night and you just opened a fresh case at least do it at a proper location not throw it in your car and go to random houses (I assume he waited the 15 minutes after and had an epipen and such with him, if not that's another story in itself)

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

#342

Post by nickff »

pmiller2 wrote: post #340
nickff wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with people editing Wikipedia and contributing to OSM as much as they'd like, but I think each activity is more focused on the 'contributor' than the audience, and I'd rather not subsidize it. I believe that Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and many other crowdsourcing projects have succeeded precisely because they harness vanity, for laudable objectives. That said, most of the 'contributors' are contributing prec…

What makes you think that remunerative work is inherently valuable to anyone other than the person paying for that work? You, like I do, probably work largely in order to line the pockets of some already rich CEO. That doesn't mean what either of us does for a living is socially valuable. This seems more like vanity to me than editing Wikipedia or improving OSM.

I can’t speak to your work, but the reason I get paid is the same reason that my employer profits, and that is because the company provides consumer surplus to its customers.

I’ve occasionally edited Wikipedia, to correct grammatical or factual errors, but I don’t see it as having contributed much to the world.

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

#343

Post by crispyambulance »

treis wrote: post #151
crispyambulance wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It took me 20 seconds of googling to find a picture of the medical director for my county. But that's not really the point. The point is that part of his job was to come up with a plan for these situations. And he settled on give them to my friends and family. That's obviously a poor choice fraught with ethical issues. Like I said, arresting him is not the answer but he is not innocent.

So, 20 seconds of googling for an HN user... yields the covid directory for your town. I just did it for philly and I got no picture id.

The doctor didn't do anything wrong!

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

#344

Post by tacon »

aktuel wrote: post #285
contravariant wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You missed the point of this story. This was in the very, very early days of vaccinations in Harris County. There was hardly any system. Harris County Public Health had to toss their first vaccination registration system, when it turned out signup invitation links could be shared and hundreds of invalid people showed up for appointments.[0] You can be sure this didn't happen after January 1, and protocols for handling extra doses are now very well known.

[0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...

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

#345

Post by civilized »

kxyvr wrote: post #339
civilized wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting post, better than most making this side of the argument. Do we know if those ERs would administer vaccines from another hospital's punctured vial in their facilities? Do we know how long it would take to get the answer to that question, trimming off the 42 minutes per person Dr. Gokal had to find, administer, and properly document the vaccine injection? And at the end of all that, would there be enough hi…

I very much agree that we don't have all of the information here and that it's very easy to Monday morning quarterback a decision that was made under pressure without good guidance. Sadly, it's possible that this whole situation will turn into a trap where there all available options have some kind of negative outcome. That said, I don't think that it's entirely inappropriate to discuss or postulate other courses of…

It turns out that Dr. Gokal was punished for "taking doses away from a vaccination site" [1]. So your proposal probably would not have kept him safe from firing or prosecution.

Other articles say that he was punished for violating a protocol which required that expiring vaccines be returned to a hub site (i.e. throw them away and let people die or be punished.)

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/crime/am...

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

#346

Post by skedaddle »

floatingatoll wrote: post #329
skrowl wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

The alternative to affording it seems worse. And your figured are rather assumptive, ignoring critical implementation details like “UBI could be written as a tax credit” or so on. But, let’s take your numbers and scenario briefly anyways. $4T per year is only 15% of GDP, right? 15% is the capital gains tax, and technically GDP is the measure of a country’s capital gained, so just apply the 15% capital gains tax to th…

Even if you can pull that much money out of... somewhere... Why is paying everyone to stop working the best use of the funds? Rather than paying for infrastructure or services or, I don't know, an awesomely large tower reaching into the sky or something?

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

#347

Post by pksebben »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #258
pas wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain a bit for those not familiar with US "progressive" stuff? What does she not prosecute and why, and why is that a problem? How left are we talking about?

Probably in this case OP is referring to identity politics and intersectionalism. Basically, the more categories of historically marginalized people groups an individual belongs to, the more acceptable that person is, the more of a voice they’re allowed to have, and the more laudable it is to favor that person (and the more unacceptable it is to fail to favor that person regardless of the circumstances). This doctor…

this is a straw man. where in the article / materials related to the case is race brought in to question? are we treating Indian-Americans as a majority group now? that's nonsense. You paint a picture of the "progressive calculus" that's quite obviously not informed by any actual exposure to it. I can only imagine the image you've adopted was gathered from outsider perspectives on what the word progressive means.

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

#348

Post by afiori »

StillBored wrote: post #114
ornitorrincos wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that works if you show it publicly(and then there is the debate that its bad because you jumped the queue, or its bad because not getting a vaccine shows they aren't trustworthy) But in spain the cases that have surfaced are of mainly politicians who got the shot and tried to keep quiet about it, which think we can all agree its bad.

So, thats a loophole, just get it done with the camera's rolling? In the US much of the vaccine resistance is a result of the news/propaganda channels a particular party (which Greg Abbot belongs to) uses to generate fear and doubt in order to win elections. So they generate the problem, then they get to help show its safe? I mean they aren't going to convince any of the hardcore conspiracy theory people they weren't…

you don't need to convince hardcore opponents, mostly you need to convince undecided people. just like in an election.

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

#349

Post by pksebben »

golemotron wrote: post #26
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.

It makes sense when you think about it. Without the rules, there's excuse to -not- find the people the vaccine is meant for and use it yourself. Anyone who thinks that this would not happen doesn't know human nature very well. They are welcome to post situations where such excuses haven't been taken advantage of. I'll take lack of replies as acceptance of my point.

"I'll take lack of replies as acceptance of my point".

Sure, buddy, you do that. Whatever helps you feel clever.

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

#350

Post by amp180 »

nickff wrote: post #342
pmiller2 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that remunerative work is inherently valuable to anyone other than the person paying for that work? You, like I do, probably work largely in order to line the pockets of some already rich CEO. That doesn't mean what either of us does for a living is socially valuable. This seems more like vanity to me than editing Wikipedia or improving OSM.

I can’t speak to your work, but the reason I get paid is the same reason that my employer profits, and that is because the company provides consumer surplus to its customers. I’ve occasionally edited Wikipedia, to correct grammatical or factual errors, but I don’t see it as having contributed much to the world.

Consumer surplus is not the only human good and infact discounts good done for humans who do not have money.

This not liking vanity thing is interesting but if you tie it to economics then anything that helps people that doesn't make money --things like free software and participating in charities-- could be considered 'vanity' too despite the good they can do.

I got similarly worked up over 'virtue signaling' and people only doing good things for personal prestige when I was an angsty teen but later realised it was better to believe that some people want to do good things sometimes because reasons.

Post reply on HN