[kippinitreal]

IMO the best reason for this isn’t even to raise funds, but rather because the rich/connected are going to do this anyways (and get away with it) so we might as well decrimalize it and make a dollar off of them in the process. I’d rather encourage them to give more money to the government than to see how low they go to validate their “essentialness”.

It’s not even clear to me that this is such a terrible way to allocate this scarce resources - if the NBA wants to spend a billion dollars on some of the first doses so they can go to work (and subsidize 50m other doses in the process) that doesn’t seem so wrong? For every 100 doses auction off 1 to pay for the other 99 (maybe even more!).

[aczerepinski]

I want the NBA to get theirs so I have something to entertain me while I’m waiting six more months for my turn.

[samizdis]

> IMO the best reason for this isn’t even to raise funds, but rather because the rich/connected are going to do this anyways (and get away with it)

An interesting point, and one made in another STAT article [1] from earlier this month - which is linked to from the more recent article:

‘There absolutely will be a black market’: How the rich and privileged can skip the line for Covid-19 vaccines

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/03/how-rich-and-privileged-...