[peteradio]

> quality adjusted life years

Do you feel comfortable acknowledging that this metric in isolation could result in trading years across age demographics? To what degree does it matter if we take 1 year of life from a child and give it to a middle aged person, doing exactly that would be fairly neutral according to QALY.

[jameshart]

Taking 1 year of life from person a and moving it to person b is fairly neutral, yes. If, without intervention, both of them were likely to live to 80, now one of them will live to 79 and the other to 81.

That probably doesn’t matter much to either a child or a middle aged person, to be honest, since neither of them has much idea of exactly how many years they have left.

It probably matters quite a lot more to a 78 year old, though.

[peteradio]

Have to agree to disagree on this issue.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Well from my understanding they'd only be equal if the middle aged person were in perfect health.

The real issue with QUALYs is that it discounts the lives of disabled folks because they might never be 100% "healthy".

[peteradio]

> Well from my understanding they'd only be equal if the middle aged person were in perfect health.

Okay, so lets change the dilemma from 1:1 to 1 child life-year traded for 2 adult-life-years. Did it get any better?

Sounds like we agree: QALY is not where we should hang our medical ethics.

[jameshart]

Not sure what kind of vaccines you’ve been taking, but realistically that trade off is not currently on the table, is it?