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
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.
Would you please stop posting ideological/political battle comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. Moreover, when an account is using HN primarily for that, that's the line at which we ban it (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for past explanations). Your account seems to be inching close to that line, if it isn't over it. That's definitely not the intended use of the site.
It's not 8B divided by the total world population, it's 8B divided by fraction of world population that is hungry. I don't know what that fraction is, but it doesn't work out to $1 per person.
I assume it refers to investment needed to create a system which would make hunger hit areas able to feed themselves, which would cure hunger world wide over the long term.
Obviously right thing? Perhaps that hubris should be saved until the results are in.....
It takes very very little government intervention to indirectly kill 1 out of 200 people. And when you move to life years lost, the government has to kill less than 1 in some absurdly high number like a 1000.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 78.8 ms ] threadAt 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
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It takes very very little government intervention to indirectly kill 1 out of 200 people. And when you move to life years lost, the government has to kill less than 1 in some absurdly high number like a 1000.