7
votes
The US' vaccine rollout is world-beating. That doesn't mean it's good enough. But let's take a moment to appreciate it.
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- Title
- The U.S.' vaccine rollout is world-beating
- Authors
- Noah Smith
- Word count
- 1841 words
What a load of absolute nonsense. I rarely use strong words about how absolutely ridiculously bad a piece of content is because those sorts of words are reserved for garbage like this.
Amount of doses each country is offered/getting is what's bottlenecking almost every country. Those are decisions vaccine companies are making, not countries.
This piece completely ignores morality. Is it right for rich countries to get all the vaccine doses when we all know that to stop the global pandemic from taking lives, from spreading and from repeat outbreaks is that serious outbreaks everywhere are shot down.
A global response is required for normalcy to return.
Poor countries with few resources and societies that can't close down because people will starve and die, are they supposed to wait until 2023 to start vaccination after everyone even in low risk groups in rich countries have been jabbed?
The right measure of vaccination success isn't amount of doses. In a situation of vaccine scarcity, the most important criteria of success is how many lives your vaccines are preventing. Are you vaccinating the at risk groups to prevent people from dying?
Are you vaccinating health care personell if that's what's necessary to keep the pandemic response on track?
Are you vaccinating those groups who're being most permanently harmed by society closing down so you can open things up for them?
How are these countries allocating doses? I'd argue that the US is one of the least systematic countries in this regard. People with resources and social capital seem to be getting too many doses. Those who need vaccines the most, aren't.
I'd argue that Israel is one of the worst countries in regard to vaccination because its approach is so nationalistic. It's just immorally selfish to vaccinate people outside high risk groups in their 40s and 50s as people are dying elsewhere.
In this overview they are supposedly the best. Countries in Asia and Oceania that have effectively prevented mass contagion are being penalized in this sort of rating system because they're taking moral responsibility to the rest of humankind seriously.
It's outrageous. If these are the types of metrics that society chooses to judge a pandemic response to, that's not a good society in my view.
Five years ago having vaccines for a novel virus like this not just produced, but properly tested in less than a year would be science fiction. Of course the rate determining step of vaccination is how quickly new vaccine production factories can be built. Money isn't a factor here. Governments are throwing money at the problem in the trillions.
Trump's terrible response (absurdly lauded in this piece) is the perfect example for how government has nothing to do with it, not that he deserves credit. US vaccination has gone well despite what the federal government did. The analysis couldn't be more off the mark.
Everyone is being nationalistic though. It’s arguable and traditional that the leaders of a country have a primary duty to the people who elected them. Utilitarianism would have it that nationality doesn’t matter and I think utilitarianism is close to right in principle, but few people act that way and that really comes out in times of crisis. The UK did better at getting vaccines than other European countries because they were decisive about spending money and cut better deals earlier. The US did similarly. Israel got a lot of vaccine (relatively) because they cut a deal about sharing detailed data about the vaccine’s effects.
This is ugly but these incentives aren’t entirely bad. It’s good that some countries threw a lot of money at the problem early rather than dithering about contract details. (Not enough, but it helped.) We know more about some vaccines because Israel is small and organized enough to collect good data about millions of people, far more than any trial could have done.
I can sort of accept national interest arguments, but really bugs me is failure to learn from other country’s experiences due to implicitly nationalist beliefs. Some people assume that the FDA must be right when other countries made different decisions, but there’s no particular reason to believe that. (And to the extent that they notice mistakes, they blame Trump and assume it’s better now.) Somehow, the strictest standards are supposed to be the best, but that means potentially life-saving treatments and tests are illegal.
We are fortunate that masks aren’t regulated as medical devices and people can make their own, even if it makes choosing a good mask more difficult.
Precisely the opposite is true in the case of EU solidarity and the Asian countries who are unwilling to outbid other countries for doses because they're handling the situation well. Many rich, western countries are being nationalistic, yes.
This nationalism is even going on at the expense of self-interest.
WHO have been clear on the impacts of this. Again, it's in the national interest of countries to have a global response if the world's integrated society is to open up again for the benefit of all.
Covid-19 is a type of virus that will likely mutate many times. We don't know how effective our vaccines will be on future mutations and how long their effect will be. There's a room for effective action and curtailing outbreaks to lower virus density before inevitable outbreaks.
We're squandering that opportunity due to short-term pressures, in part because people want to travel for summer holidays and similar, luxury reasons. Democracies accepting of the most stringent responses to a pandemic are unsurprisingly handling this pandemic the best: People there accept a greater degree of encroachment on personal freedoms for the good of society as a whole.
Yes, when countries that are handling the situation well allow others to go first, that seems like a good thing. More lives saved. I don't think that applies to the EU though?
With respect to squandering opportunity, I am primarily worried about vaccines being wasted or sitting on shelves, but I also don't think it would make sense to allocate a short supply of vaccine equally over the whole world; that would mean it's so rare everywhere that it doesn't do much good. Nationalism is hardly a fair way to handle this, but I'm not sure what would be a good way?
This article is pushing for two doses rather than first-dose-first. The refusal of the US to do what the UK is doing will likely get more people killed.
There are risks on either side and so it’s a gamble either way, but it’s nothing to be self-congratulatory about when you don’t even know that it’s the right decision.