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by ixacto
1842 days ago
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The government, well in this case multiple levels of state/federal/city/tribal governments all made up their own decisions on what defined one as eligible for the vaccine, and then randomly changed them. The government should not be the arbiter of one’s morality. It was a mess and IMO difficult to assign anyone in the moral right in the distribution of vaccines. For example, looking at the vaccine distribution from a utilitarian perspective and not a political-agenda perspective it would have made sense to give the vaccine to healthcare workers first and then grocery workers next, as society in general will collapse if people are not able to get groceries. In a strictly calculative sense society doesn’t care if a few more old people in a nursing home die, but if grocery stores are closed there will be food riots/massive problems in a few days. But politicians know that old people vote. So we had the age-tiered system. IMO both if these perspectives were misguided and the optimal way to handle it would have been to had over vaccine logistics to Amazon who could actually make a web app that doesn’t crash to register for vaccines and just go first-come first-served. Instead we had to try to register via Kroger (I think) who was using a chatbot to register people which was not very effective or high throughput. Costco had spaghetti code and had embedded way too much information in the page source, no idea who designed their signup page either. This incompetence and unneeded beauracracy by the government literally cost lives. |
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If people vote and decide that this is the way that it is being done, then people should respect that. Circumventing rationing because you feel like you are more deserving in that context is unethical.
> utilitarian perspective and not a political-agenda perspective it would have made sense to give the vaccine to healthcare workers first and then grocery workers next, as society in general will collapse if people are not able to get groceries
Not at all clear that this is the conclusion to reach. Grocery store workers are much more likely to spread, but are also very unlikely to be killed by it. Elderly people are likely to be killed by it. Most epidemiological modeling showed that vaccinating the elderly first and as quickly as possible was the fastest way to mitigate deaths, not vaccinating coronavirus.
This is exactly why it is better to come to these decisions as a society, not let individuals who may very well come to incorrect judgements about what the socially optimal thing to do is.
> IMO both if these perspectives were misguided and the optimal way to handle it would have been to had over vaccine logistics to Amazon who could actually make a web app that doesn’t crash to register for vaccines and just go first-come first-served.
This is classic HN backseat driver-ism. First-come first-served would have been ineffective, because again, there were ample reasons why vaccinating the elderly first made sense.