But it’s not a life saving measure in the same way a surgery might be. It’s life saving in the sense of seatbelts. And given a bit of time everyone can hopefully get it. I’m having trouble imagining many scenarios where getting the vaccine now vs. a bit later makes such a massive difference.
Well, if you're a seventy-year-old in a nursing home, or a nurse seeing 70 patients a day, or a doctor involved in COVID care, there's a huge difference. There's a reason deployment is prioritized.
What I think of is the jet setting sales person. Now worry free back in the skies and in the hotels pounding the pavement.
Then I realize who would they go meet?
> $25k seems low for a life-saving queue-jump during a crisis.
Not really. Right off the bat, if you figure there's a 1% chance you die if you get it and a 20% change you get it, that values a life at $12.5M. That's a little on the low side for someone rich, but not not by that much.
You also have to factor in that it's free in 6 months, and for at least 3 months, it's not like you can do anything. The drug is also experimental, so there's an off chance something really bad happens. The vaccine also means you won't be a long hauler, so that adds some value.
The point is, we don't have to worry about what feels right when we have the ability to implement a computerized auction and maximize the wealth we extract from these people in the first place.
I agree with OP. I'm betting if you have an open auction, 25k would come in on the low side.
Also, you’re not factoring in the reputational and legal risk to those bribed, and the fact that the rich try to get it with the specific intent to ramp up their riskier activities once they get it, which will allow them to do valuable things in a disproportionately valuable time frame.
I don't think so, considering that the wealthy were hoarding PPE and ventilators at the height of the crisis. It would be fascinating to see the wealthy scramble for this early vaccine, only to find that it has some horrible side-effect. Darn shame.
I'm not an economist but wouldn't that basically make it impossible for people in the middle class to get it? if the doses are sold to the wealthy at the top end, and that money goes to buy doses for those at the bottom end, how do people in the middle get access?
This isn't actually that crazy, if it is done by states rather than hospitals.
If state governments set aside some amount of vaccines and auctioned them off to the highest bidders, it might help cover the budget shortfalls and cuts to social services that are going to come in the next few years as a result of states draining their budgets to pay unemployment benefits during the pandemic.
Those cuts would disproportionately affect the poor, and the rich wouldn't care -- but we can get the rich to help us avoid making the cuts.
Given that many of the rich donors would be old, and therefore members of the high risk group eligible for early vaccination, such auctions might not actually make a big difference in who gets the vaccines first.
Since we all know that the wealthy will figure out how to cut the line, I wish we would just own up to it and auction off a certain number of doses and give the money to those affected by the pandemic.
Why not do both? And ATM why not execute a measure that is the one more acceptable to everyone, I.e. auction? I doubt any typical citizens would be mad at auction off 1% and use the fund to increase the total supply by 10% or even 100%.
Did you see the number I am proposing? How is that getting 110% or even 200% of the planned supply "taking away from the people who need them most"?
I think it's quite easy to setup the logistics of auction in such a way that it would have no impact on the distribution to the normal people. The rich can utilize their own expensive network of operators or let them figure out a way to get their precious vaccines and leave the mass infrastructure for the people needs them most.
"Let's raise funds" auction is rasing funds. And it's perfectly sensible to setup other channels of fund raising as well.
And again, auction is not countering anything else one can propose. It's about getting the rich to shoulder their fair share of running the society. After all their fortune comes from the society, they have more stake in maintaining and keep it running.
Mind you, any large system has good and bad parts, and they can change roles under different circumstances, across different time periods; some change fast and some slow; some never come back, and some can hop back and forth.
Auction with small amount of highly daughter after goods is a reasonable approach to demand fair share of social responsibility from the rich. After all, why do we want to grant them the same cheapness that they inevitably are entitled to but are not really fair to others?
Some people see this as corruption, but the correct way to see this is as an opportunity to get rich people to give money to everyone else.
When rich people are trying to give away money, we should try to direct that money to good causes. We have an opportunity to do that here.
What would you prefer: that rich people give away money, or that they keep all of it to themselves? If they want to give it away we should certainly be interested in how to direct it. If they keep it to themselves, nobody benefits except them.
I think the fundamental issue here is that they're not giving their money away for free. They're taking life-saving medication from people who need it more. People will die preventable deaths when we auction off our supply.
That doesn't really make sense. There has to be a point, and likely it's a pretty low figure, at which the life-saving value of getting and using money offsets whatever downside comes with giving a rich person the vaccine. Obviously receiving $100 billion for one vial of vaccine would be an appropriate tradeoff, you can save any number of lives with that money. Once you acknowledge this, it's also obvious that a much smaller amount would also save lives. An auction would likely kick up low to mid five figures, maybe even six figures, and the utility of that money is almost certainly higher than the single vial. This is even before you consider that the vaccine will wind up in the hands of rich people anyway, with no additional utility to anyone.
We expect it because it happens enough that to believe there will come a time it won't happen is foolish.
Tolerating, however isn't something that should happen. Though as people are discussing, maybe in this case turn it from corruption where it'll pad some people's pockets to a legitimate way to fund initiatives to help the less fortunate can be beneficial.
Is it right? No, but humanity rarely follows what's right when its more beneficial to certain people to follow the wrong paths.
Interesting a younger Donald Trump proposed a wealth tax back in 1999 (of 14.5% on $10M or more). But the 16th Amendment clearly says "income" tax. It doesn't say "wealth" or "assets" or "property", so any wealth tax without an amendment would fail on constitutional grounds.
Yes I remember him proposing that; as I recall, the quid pro quo was a concomitant permanent abolition of the estate tax, which would have a sweet deal for the Trump dynasty.
Because nobody is wealthy. The "wealthy" is always that other person who has more than me.
Truth is that everybody in the US (and Europe) is wealthy. The panhandler on the corner is making more money than the median daily income of the world population.
Until people admit "I am wealthy, and I need to help out" instead of pointing to whoever has more wealth than they do, nothing will change.
Simply not true. Poorer households give a larger proportion of their income.
> It is clear from the graph that when put in the context of their individual budgets, donor households towards the lower end of the expenditure distribution tend to give away more of their money to charity than donor households in the higher expenditure percentiles. On this measure, poorer donor households are more generous than richer donor households, those in the bottom decile donating approximately 3% of their budget compared with those in the top decile donating roughly 1%.
Your argument is completely non-sequiter. My point has nothing to do with who gives what portion of their income. My point is that when defining who is rich, it's almost always somebody else. While taxing the rich more than the poor is a reasonable proposition, it usually will fail when defining who is actually rich, because most of whoever finds themselves defined as rich, will object and point to somebody making more than themselves as the "truly rich".
If a rich person gives $100 and a poor person gives $10, it's still just $10. It might be more of their income in proportion, but it's still only $10. It doesn't magically become $100 just because it was more of the poor person's income.
IMO a wealth tax completely misses an unspoken fact of finance: Tax evasion is illegal; tax avoidance is not. For every "wealth tax" you come up with, there will always be loop holes that the wealthy use to avoid paying it. Eventually the net gain is zero.
The only way for those loop holes not to be would be if the government were entirely staffed from top to bottom by poor people, including (or perhaps especially) everyone who is elected.
Speaking of which, you'd first have to ban all election spending. Campaigning would be done by marching in the street with a bristol board sign colored with crayons, taped to a softwood plank.
The best thing to do would be to plow this money back into vaccine production and distribution, since that's the reason that the wealthy shouldn't be able to shortcut the process in the first place—it needing to work well for everyone.
Why don't we just sell a very limited quantity of Class A drugs and cut out the street dealers?
It's a nice idea, but barely skims the problem. Everybody else still wants it, and now they think it's okay to throw money around.
The problem we're really describing is too much money turning people into psychopaths. You'd let them spend it, I think it's easier to just make that a punishable offense. You can't be grotesque with money if you don't have it anymore.
Governments (aka taxpayers - present and future), NGOs, and a myriad private philanthropy endeavors donated Billions of dollars to create the vaccines, jump start production, and secure volume for the entire population.
Turning to market distribution after taking on free public money to make a vaccine available to everyone sounds like pure corruption.
People don't like it when we do things to highlight the fact that, as stated in Animal Farm, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"
There aren't 10 wealthy people. There's about 12 million millionaire households in this country. That's not even discussing the generational implications of that. Young couple in their 20s or 30s that don't have a lot of wealth themselves, but can fallback onto a parental group to help them. There's only ~210 million people > 18 years of age. 12 million households is a lot even when you start excluding people based on being cash poor (locked up in long-term bonds, most of it is housing appreciation, etc).
These people generally can afford their own health care, they have good health outcomes even when they get COVID (access to health care, diet, general healthiness, etc). They likely already have jobs that they can do remotely & generally minimize contact with other people indoors via food delivery services & whatnot.
We're already prioritizing lots of "famous" people because they need to help the media get the message out. I find this argument questionable but at least it's plausible & I haven't researched the data/case studies on this. The rest of us need to wait. We need to make sure that we're prioritizing those people who are likely to GET COVID multiplied by their expected likelihood of how many people they'd infect & somehow score that against their personal risk for fatality. In a list like that I'd expect elderly homes to get the most attention. Very susceptible as we have seen in the reports. Doctors & nurses would be lower as they have access to healthcare, they have great access to high quality handling of COVID, etc.
These are the guidelines I would use. Then I'd have the candidate groups vote amongst themselves in terms of who they think should have priority. If there's a nurse there that's well like & is working two jobs that have them in contact with large population groups because of shitty pay, let that information source bubble up to the overall organizational level. Then from those loops have cut-offs (i.e. everyone this spot & below gets the next batch because there's more needy people elsewhere). As you vaccinate more of a group then you end up having better heard immunity. As you vaccinate more people who travel between groups regularly, you decrease the speed of disease spread.
There are ways to do this fairly & efficiently. The problem is how to fight the innate selfishness we all have where we look with either missing or partial data & complete the gaps in a way that happens to benefit the group I'm in in some way. At the extremes you have those who are willing to do it blatantly & pay bribes to get advantage over their fellow being. At the other it's "we have to use famous/powerful people to advertise!", or "sell to the rich!" which again promote ways of privileging the people who make these decisions & their friend networks. This kind of flawed thinking is eating apart American society. We need to be focused downward. How can we best help those less fortunate than ourselves. We need to get them to the poorest & most vulnerable the fastest. They're suffering from it the most & are likely to be in housing conditions or working conditions that keep the disease alive longer. Why is this important? The disease has a fantastic opportunity to mutate if vaccine doesn't perfectly contain it. Think Spanish Flu that turned into the annual flu. Or we can roll the dice again on this thing. YOLO?
> One occupation whose priority is being hotly debated is teaching. The C.D.C. includes educators as essential workers. But not everyone agrees with that designation.
> Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that teachers should not be included as essential workers, if a central goal of the committee is to reduce health inequities.
> “Teachers have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees,” he said. “Of course they should be treated better, but they are not among the most mistreated of workers.”
> Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
At risk of feeding a political debate ... JFC! Teachers are an absolutely vital pillar of the economy, both for preparing the next generation, and for freeing up the parents for full time work. Their inability to do their jobs right now is absolutely crippling the economy and amplifying they crisis tenfold. The virtualization of classrooms has already had effects that will be felt for years.
And they’re seriously arguing for holding that up on the grounds that teachers are too white and well-off? Wow.
The chronic underpayment of teachers looks almost trivial by comparisons.
Seems like you could use the same logic and don't vaccinate doctors and nurses because they're are paid well and educated. People will get outraged about anything.
An auction would be quite a clever way to mitigate this issue while raising funds. I wonder if there’s a way to quickly spool up a secure auction system. I’d be curious to know how much could be raised if 1% of the supply was reserved for that.
Still distributing the proceeds of the auction would have the same problem.
GPS trackers on tamper proof containers with computerized scales? With some sort of self destruct system? Perhaps 24/7 monitoring from a command centre? Or just post armed guards 24/7 at each distribution point. Sky’s the limit it seems if cost is no object.
Well one method can be implemented immediately, and the results will be immediately evident, whereas the other actually invites further corruption, because distribution is precisely the problem that we are trying to solve.
It's not clear that there's a distribution problem here, and it seems pretty obvious to me that giving them to the highest bidder would make whatever distribution scheme we have even worse.
I don't expect to much of a black market during the first phase since the vaccines are being sent directly to hospitals and nursing homes. Medication in those places tends to be literally locked down (initially just for drugs of abuse but recently I've heard most medication is becoming tracked and locked down). Although since the vaccine has to be stored in a freezer, I'm not quite sure how hospitals will keep their supply secure other than having a guard.
Once the second phase opens next year and allows anyone with a risk factor including some pretty common ones; diabetes and obesity, I expect the rules to be bent a bit more and a black/greymarket to gain traction. Although, wealthy people tend to be older anyway which makes them more likely to qualifying risk factors.
You could just sell the hanukkah doses. No one's tracking those. You're also not allowed to pool partial doses, but I'm sure someone paying $25k would be fine with a pooled dose.
A lot of the vaccine vials that had 5 doses actually have 6 or 7. The hanukkah story is about a candle that had enough oil to burn one night, but it lasted 8. This happened right on hanukkah, too.
Traditionally, vaccines have been tried out in the poorest countries first... because it's easy to do if all you have to do for masses to show up is bribe the leaders and give hungry people free food. If things go wrong, "they died of hunger" and nobody cares.
So, I think this is just an effort to manufacture consent. "The rich people are willing to pay a lot for it. Are you sure you don't want it?"
I think there is a better way to do it than to give it to doctors and other frontline workers. They're too valuable. The people who are going to get it should be randomly drafted to get it... over and over again until we reach critical mass. Eventually, we should leave out enough people unvaccinated and hence long term effects can be less catastrophic.
I have no doubt this is happening, but this article seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill.
Most of the article is about hypothetical situations where boutique doctor clinics might receive vaccine allocations that would go to their wealthy client base. Unless I'm missing something, the article doesn't actually say it's happening, just that it might.
The headline claim about one person asking about a $25K donation comes from a single anecdote in the middle of the article:
> Dr. Jeff Toll, who has admitting privileges at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, one of the first hospitals to stock the vaccine, recalled a patient asking: “If I donate $25,000 to Cedars, would that help me get in line?’” Toll said no.
The rest of the article makes a logical leap from people asking their doctors when they can get the vaccine to implications that they are trying to skip the line by paying extra, simply because they're wealthy. The author throws in some anti-Hollywood and anti-Silicon Valley jabs for good measure:
> The pattern is familiar in a state where Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley executives are accustomed to getting their way.
There doesn't seem to be much substance to this article, beyond the one anecdote from one guy who asked about a $25K donation.
It's just your standard rage bait that Bernie/AOC fans can share on their Instagram stories. But Laura and Maya can now feed their kids thanks to the clicks they got the LA times.
If this needed further demonstration, this whole COVID crisis showed how irrational humans are. It's flabbergasting how, in the same world, a person would want to pay more to get access to a vaccine first while another wants to avoid it at all costs. That is not at all how things work.
> Why is this an important signal, given healthcare teams have already decided on a priority order?
Because if we handle it right, we can get the wealthy to pay for the vaccine production for everyone else, or plow that money into state governments to prevent the cuts to social services that are coming.
I have suggested, in another comment, directing the money to states rather than hospitals.
We don't need to take the narrow view that hospitals are the only way to do this. Let the states run the show, let them take the money, and let them use the money for social services, or to reimburse hospitals for vaccines, or whatever else that will make a positive impact.
I find it ironic, that in a nation that complains so bitterly about its healthcare system and the associated costs of care, there are so many willing to exponentially increase the costs of an item just because people need it and some can afford it.
I'm just working in the real world. If you can wave a magic wand and bring socialized medicine to the United States I'd take it. Until then we must rely on market-based solutions.
With your actions, you build the world around you.
Saying you would take socialised medicine and yet prioritising actions which oppose this goal mean it’s not what you actually want and so you’ll never get it.
The whole reason the cost is high is because there is scarcity.
You’re not “getting the rich to pay” - you’re preventing the poor from accessing the drug, placing vulnerable less wealthy peoples life’s in danger because you prioritised doses for people who can pay (who would _get it anyway_ if they had a risk factor).
You’re literally trading a risk on one persons life for somebody elses money.
Not to mention the moral issue of “how many doses are set aside?”, because why not sell all of them for $25k if that’s the price you can get?
No, what you're literally doing is trading a risk on one person's life for a risk on another person's life (who has money). A person is vaccinated either way. All else being equal, rationality says you should choose the path lined with money.
They did it with the first covid tests, when us plebs couldn't get a test even when we were sick, those hollywood stars and athletes got access to the tests right away.
Why not? If someone produces $1mil of value in a year, his or her good health is more important to society than someone who produces no value. Even someone on the political left should value the $300K in tax revenue that the high earner may generate.
I don't even want to contemplate the vaccine. Yesterday I went to my doctor just for a COVID test, as I will be traveling over the holidays. He asked me to wait to get the test until the last possible minute as my insurance will only pay for ONE test. Any additional tests will be $750 out of pocket. I would hope that we could work out cheap, rapid testing first, before deciding the price of a vaccine.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadA $25,000 donation is kind of laughable when hospitals have no issue charging that much to give a kid some stitches after falling off a bike.
Try 100x that maybe?
But even beside that, just intuitively, $25k seems low for a life-saving queue-jump during a crisis.
Not really. Right off the bat, if you figure there's a 1% chance you die if you get it and a 20% change you get it, that values a life at $12.5M. That's a little on the low side for someone rich, but not not by that much.
You also have to factor in that it's free in 6 months, and for at least 3 months, it's not like you can do anything. The drug is also experimental, so there's an off chance something really bad happens. The vaccine also means you won't be a long hauler, so that adds some value.
$25k feels about right.
I agree with OP. I'm betting if you have an open auction, 25k would come in on the low side.
Also, you’re not factoring in the reputational and legal risk to those bribed, and the fact that the rich try to get it with the specific intent to ramp up their riskier activities once they get it, which will allow them to do valuable things in a disproportionately valuable time frame.
If state governments set aside some amount of vaccines and auctioned them off to the highest bidders, it might help cover the budget shortfalls and cuts to social services that are going to come in the next few years as a result of states draining their budgets to pay unemployment benefits during the pandemic.
Those cuts would disproportionately affect the poor, and the rich wouldn't care -- but we can get the rich to help us avoid making the cuts.
Given that many of the rich donors would be old, and therefore members of the high risk group eligible for early vaccination, such auctions might not actually make a big difference in who gets the vaccines first.
It’s basically a tax on the wealthy.
Why not do both? And ATM why not execute a measure that is the one more acceptable to everyone, I.e. auction? I doubt any typical citizens would be mad at auction off 1% and use the fund to increase the total supply by 10% or even 100%.
If the problem is funding, then lets raise funds. We don't need to sacrifice our vaccine distribution for that.
I think it's quite easy to setup the logistics of auction in such a way that it would have no impact on the distribution to the normal people. The rich can utilize their own expensive network of operators or let them figure out a way to get their precious vaccines and leave the mass infrastructure for the people needs them most.
"Let's raise funds" auction is rasing funds. And it's perfectly sensible to setup other channels of fund raising as well.
And again, auction is not countering anything else one can propose. It's about getting the rich to shoulder their fair share of running the society. After all their fortune comes from the society, they have more stake in maintaining and keep it running.
But, I still need evidence that money is not the constraints, or it could not help resolve other constraints. Please enlighten me with what you know.
Mind you, any large system has good and bad parts, and they can change roles under different circumstances, across different time periods; some change fast and some slow; some never come back, and some can hop back and forth.
Auction with small amount of highly daughter after goods is a reasonable approach to demand fair share of social responsibility from the rich. After all, why do we want to grant them the same cheapness that they inevitably are entitled to but are not really fair to others?
Apologize if you meant differently.
When rich people are trying to give away money, we should try to direct that money to good causes. We have an opportunity to do that here.
What would you prefer: that rich people give away money, or that they keep all of it to themselves? If they want to give it away we should certainly be interested in how to direct it. If they keep it to themselves, nobody benefits except them.
Tolerating, however isn't something that should happen. Though as people are discussing, maybe in this case turn it from corruption where it'll pad some people's pockets to a legitimate way to fund initiatives to help the less fortunate can be beneficial.
Is it right? No, but humanity rarely follows what's right when its more beneficial to certain people to follow the wrong paths.
In other words, loss aversion is a strong incentive.
People would rather over-pay to receive something than pay for a general tax (a loss) even when it would provide an absolute equivalent result.
Truth is that everybody in the US (and Europe) is wealthy. The panhandler on the corner is making more money than the median daily income of the world population.
Until people admit "I am wealthy, and I need to help out" instead of pointing to whoever has more wealth than they do, nothing will change.
> It is clear from the graph that when put in the context of their individual budgets, donor households towards the lower end of the expenditure distribution tend to give away more of their money to charity than donor households in the higher expenditure percentiles. On this measure, poorer donor households are more generous than richer donor households, those in the bottom decile donating approximately 3% of their budget compared with those in the top decile donating roughly 1%.
http://www.cgap.org.uk/uploads/Briefing%20Papers/CGAP%20BN7%...
Speaking of which, you'd first have to ban all election spending. Campaigning would be done by marching in the street with a bristol board sign colored with crayons, taped to a softwood plank.
The former essentially offsets the negative impact by creating positive externalities, unlike the latter.
It's a nice idea, but barely skims the problem. Everybody else still wants it, and now they think it's okay to throw money around.
The problem we're really describing is too much money turning people into psychopaths. You'd let them spend it, I think it's easier to just make that a punishable offense. You can't be grotesque with money if you don't have it anymore.
Turning to market distribution after taking on free public money to make a vaccine available to everyone sounds like pure corruption.
There aren't 10 wealthy people. There's about 12 million millionaire households in this country. That's not even discussing the generational implications of that. Young couple in their 20s or 30s that don't have a lot of wealth themselves, but can fallback onto a parental group to help them. There's only ~210 million people > 18 years of age. 12 million households is a lot even when you start excluding people based on being cash poor (locked up in long-term bonds, most of it is housing appreciation, etc).
These people generally can afford their own health care, they have good health outcomes even when they get COVID (access to health care, diet, general healthiness, etc). They likely already have jobs that they can do remotely & generally minimize contact with other people indoors via food delivery services & whatnot.
We're already prioritizing lots of "famous" people because they need to help the media get the message out. I find this argument questionable but at least it's plausible & I haven't researched the data/case studies on this. The rest of us need to wait. We need to make sure that we're prioritizing those people who are likely to GET COVID multiplied by their expected likelihood of how many people they'd infect & somehow score that against their personal risk for fatality. In a list like that I'd expect elderly homes to get the most attention. Very susceptible as we have seen in the reports. Doctors & nurses would be lower as they have access to healthcare, they have great access to high quality handling of COVID, etc.
These are the guidelines I would use. Then I'd have the candidate groups vote amongst themselves in terms of who they think should have priority. If there's a nurse there that's well like & is working two jobs that have them in contact with large population groups because of shitty pay, let that information source bubble up to the overall organizational level. Then from those loops have cut-offs (i.e. everyone this spot & below gets the next batch because there's more needy people elsewhere). As you vaccinate more of a group then you end up having better heard immunity. As you vaccinate more people who travel between groups regularly, you decrease the speed of disease spread.
There are ways to do this fairly & efficiently. The problem is how to fight the innate selfishness we all have where we look with either missing or partial data & complete the gaps in a way that happens to benefit the group I'm in in some way. At the extremes you have those who are willing to do it blatantly & pay bribes to get advantage over their fellow being. At the other it's "we have to use famous/powerful people to advertise!", or "sell to the rich!" which again promote ways of privileging the people who make these decisions & their friend networks. This kind of flawed thinking is eating apart American society. We need to be focused downward. How can we best help those less fortunate than ourselves. We need to get them to the poorest & most vulnerable the fastest. They're suffering from it the most & are likely to be in housing conditions or working conditions that keep the disease alive longer. Why is this important? The disease has a fantastic opportunity to mutate if vaccine doesn't perfectly contain it. Think Spanish Flu that turned into the annual flu. Or we can roll the dice again on this thing. YOLO?
Let us hope this is true. Because it appears that public policy experts are racializing the question of who is an "essential worker" and who should be getting the vaccine first: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-vaccine-firs...
> One occupation whose priority is being hotly debated is teaching. The C.D.C. includes educators as essential workers. But not everyone agrees with that designation.
> Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that teachers should not be included as essential workers, if a central goal of the committee is to reduce health inequities.
> “Teachers have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees,” he said. “Of course they should be treated better, but they are not among the most mistreated of workers.”
> Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
And they’re seriously arguing for holding that up on the grounds that teachers are too white and well-off? Wow.
The chronic underpayment of teachers looks almost trivial by comparisons.
Still distributing the proceeds of the auction would have the same problem.
GPS trackers on tamper proof containers with computerized scales? With some sort of self destruct system? Perhaps 24/7 monitoring from a command centre? Or just post armed guards 24/7 at each distribution point. Sky’s the limit it seems if cost is no object.
I don't think we should acquiesce to corruption like you're proposing. There are better ways to raise funds.
Once the second phase opens next year and allows anyone with a risk factor including some pretty common ones; diabetes and obesity, I expect the rules to be bent a bit more and a black/greymarket to gain traction. Although, wealthy people tend to be older anyway which makes them more likely to qualifying risk factors.
Traditionally, vaccines have been tried out in the poorest countries first... because it's easy to do if all you have to do for masses to show up is bribe the leaders and give hungry people free food. If things go wrong, "they died of hunger" and nobody cares.
This time around, it may be a bit tricky to do that, so it has to be tried out closer to home. The problem is people are not willing to be guinea pigs. Many would rather wait and see: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/who-wants-be-guinea-pig-h...
So, I think this is just an effort to manufacture consent. "The rich people are willing to pay a lot for it. Are you sure you don't want it?"
I think there is a better way to do it than to give it to doctors and other frontline workers. They're too valuable. The people who are going to get it should be randomly drafted to get it... over and over again until we reach critical mass. Eventually, we should leave out enough people unvaccinated and hence long term effects can be less catastrophic.
Most of the article is about hypothetical situations where boutique doctor clinics might receive vaccine allocations that would go to their wealthy client base. Unless I'm missing something, the article doesn't actually say it's happening, just that it might.
The headline claim about one person asking about a $25K donation comes from a single anecdote in the middle of the article:
> Dr. Jeff Toll, who has admitting privileges at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, one of the first hospitals to stock the vaccine, recalled a patient asking: “If I donate $25,000 to Cedars, would that help me get in line?’” Toll said no.
The rest of the article makes a logical leap from people asking their doctors when they can get the vaccine to implications that they are trying to skip the line by paying extra, simply because they're wealthy. The author throws in some anti-Hollywood and anti-Silicon Valley jabs for good measure:
> The pattern is familiar in a state where Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley executives are accustomed to getting their way.
There doesn't seem to be much substance to this article, beyond the one anecdote from one guy who asked about a $25K donation.
Why is this an important signal, given healthcare teams have already decided on a priority order?
Because if we handle it right, we can get the wealthy to pay for the vaccine production for everyone else, or plow that money into state governments to prevent the cuts to social services that are coming.
If you think the states should get the money, then taxes are a better approach.
Giving this to rich people does nothing to further immunity in vulnerable sectors of the population - it weakens that goal.
We don't need to take the narrow view that hospitals are the only way to do this. Let the states run the show, let them take the money, and let them use the money for social services, or to reimburse hospitals for vaccines, or whatever else that will make a positive impact.
Your approach baffles me.
Saying you would take socialised medicine and yet prioritising actions which oppose this goal mean it’s not what you actually want and so you’ll never get it.
You’re not “getting the rich to pay” - you’re preventing the poor from accessing the drug, placing vulnerable less wealthy peoples life’s in danger because you prioritised doses for people who can pay (who would _get it anyway_ if they had a risk factor).
You’re literally trading a risk on one persons life for somebody elses money.
Not to mention the moral issue of “how many doses are set aside?”, because why not sell all of them for $25k if that’s the price you can get?