[zaroth]

This is one of the better critiques I’ve found of the CDC’s very absurd position:

https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-im-losing-trust-in-th...

Literally their plan was to kill a greater number of people “because ethics”. It goes against well established pillars of ethical logic against “leveling” outcomes by intentionally making things worse for a group that is better off, and against the most fundamental tenant of medicine to do no harm.

You must apportion a limited supply of life saving medicine to the population most likely to benefit from it. To claim that apportioning the medicine to a population which is orders of magnitudes less likely to benefit from it, knowing that a greater number of people will die as a result, is an abject ethical failure.

Even accounting for the smaller minority share of the elderly population, you still kill more minorities overall by apportioning the vaccine to essential workers ahead of the elderly, because the death rate is so heavily skewed based on age.

[erentz]

Be warned Yascha has become (or always was, I'm not sure) a grifter hack. He jumped on the cancel culture grift now he's joining in with other armchair epidemiologists such as Matty Yglesias and Nate Silver in misreading slides and propagating a made up controversy about vaccine distribution. The ACIP meeting was recorded and open to journalists. They could go review it, but strangely they didn't. I don't see them reporting video from the meeting where they say anything of the sort your're suggesting.

EDIT: This whole thing is nothing but semi-sophisticated click bait and this is objectively untrue:

> "When the CDC is willing to kill thousands of people in the name of social justice, it's hard to know whom or what to trust.

> So I wrote about its shocking failure of judgment, and my crisis of faith in America’s institutions, for @JoinPersuasion." -- Yascha Mounk, Dec 23, 2020 [1]

Others here have already explained this and shown the priority list from CDC.

[1] https://twitter.com/yascha_mounk/status/1341866668528717824