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by justtologin 1648 days ago
I think the point of the headline is to show how shockingly low the cost would be compared to the economic cost of covid.

At the same time, it's a bit disingenuous. What does "vaccinate the world" mean now? Two shots, three, ongoing six-monthly boosters? Even that ignores the fact that the vaccine doesn't work that well on new variants. It would be nice if it was that simple to just spend a "trivial" amount of money and end this, but I don't see anything actionable here

Thinking more about this, it's a bit the same as the thing with Elon Musk and the world food program, in that proponents have put a price tag on something that's not too high, but when you dig into it, that something doesn't really get you as far as it's proponents make it out. It would be great to see Elon or someone of similar means say they will put up the $50 Bn if they are given a sound proposal of how it would end covid restrictions

2 comments

And 80%+ rates are not enough to stop fascist totalitarian policies... And those rates are at 2 doses. Who knows to how many we end up before we simply give up.
If you have global vaccination, you reduce the opportunity for new strains; we're getting variants like omicrom because we have large populations of vaccinated and unvaccinated mixing. If you wanted to create a situation in which new strains were inevitable, you couldn't plan it better.