Even if you apply rationing (you could say that every dose purchased must be associated with a natural person who is going to get the vaccine as soon as it's shipped), the vaccine maker is now in the same position - why sell the vaccine for $100/dose to Hospital A today if they suspect that the bigger, richer, more bureaucratic Hospital B will get around to making an offer for $110/dose tomorrow?
So the "free market" solution here involves compelling the vaccine makers to accept any price offered immediately as well as preventing a secondary market, i.e., killing every mechanism for price discovery, which is the core mechanism of free markets. You can't really call it a market at that point, and all your intuitions about market efficiency go out the window.
Which isn't to say that I think a market allocation would be working any better (there'd be plenty of stupid buyers and so on).
Also, the 6 months is for deep freeze storage, the next level of storage, the shippers+dry ice, is 30 days.
The free market is the second fastest organisational method we have, beaten only by the military which can achieve specific operational goals extremely quickly. The free market is by far the fastest and most efficient force at sustained logistics.
As I recall it first group to have good Coronavirus testing was the Koreans who let private industry do its thing [0]. The free market with government as another equal client would be faster than the government at distribution a vaccine.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/12/asia/coronavirus-south-ko...
WTF are we spending so much money on them for if not for combating something that's caused hundreds of thousands of deaths?
As in "fly over to Pakistan and assassinate bin Laden" sort of goals. Stuff that burns unreasonable amounts of resources to do something very specific very quickly. If something takes months to execute the market will be faster.
"Get a vaccine to everyone who can afford it" is something that the market will be fastest at. It would be prudent to leave it alone to solve that problem. Government can go solve a different problem.
The market SUCKS at strategic goals. It's basically the opposite: you're giving up on strategic goals because you're in a situation where you don't think central planning can be as effective as competition. But military history shows us that central planning can be very effective for this sort of campaign, complete with elaborate supply chains and logistical accomplishments.
Markets are generally smart enough not to think killing large numbers of people and overthrowing governments is a good idea. If the US government was somehow replaced with a market the Middle East would likely be a more peaceful place. Markets generally find better ways of doing things - like financial incentives - than military intervention.
I'm more than happy to admit defeat if you want to argue that markets are ineffective at subjugating exotic new lands. In terms of defence, I havn't looked in to it at all. I expect market based economies to beat command and control economies at war because they can better sustain an effort.
The Swiss have their bank accounts, yes. You could convincingly argue that people who are happy to accept low gains as a tradeoff for low risk are interested in avoiding war. But the world's largest markets are in the US. And before they were in the US, they were in the capital of the British Empire.
Markets are very good at solving the sort of problems they solve. But be careful about extrapolating that into "Markets are very good."
(Also, don't forget about the British East India Company.)
Think back to the toilet paper shortage, or the mask shortage, or the hand sanitizer shortage, and how long it took the market to respond to those events. Maybe the market is the "second fastest' method we have, in relative terms. My point is it's still very slow, and if you're saying that days matter, the market is not the tool we want.
(That said, throwing the military at this problem seems fine to me, honestly. It is a special case of throwing the government at the problem; it's the branch of the government that specializes in logistics and quick decision-making in life-or-death scenarios, as you point out, and they are used to dealing with situations that arise exactly once in the history of the world.)
Not long? Toilet paper distribution recovered quickly, little old ladies are now knitting masks and I hear distilleries have started converting into hand sanitiser plants. There was a month of confusion then in my experience everything started snapping back to normal. I've never seen so much hand sanitiser as is now available.
> My point is it's still very slow, and if you're saying that days matter, the market is not the tool we want.
Yet if we don't go with the market I bet a worse alternative will be chosen. Back in March-February people would have argued in February that the US CDC was there to overrule greedy companies rushing out coronavirus tests and make sure that there are high quality standards. Then the CDC shipped a test that didn't work and scuppered the US's opportunity to nip the pandemic in the bud. That instance alone is a damning indictment of a government-first response to a healthcare emergency.
People can keep making a big song and dance about how this time the market can't possibly work because it is different to all the other times the market worked really well. Then the government will implement something slower than just letting people buy vaccines like everything else. In time the complete screw-up of the response will be used as evidence that there is no way a free market could have handled something so complicated.
Pretty much every time a free market has been used to solve a problem, the problem gets resolved as fast as possible with minimum fuss. The only exception is problems that poor people have. Coronavirus is not a poor-person-problem. Leaving it to the market will get great results.
> That said, throwing the military at this problem seems fine to me, honestly.
It'll be slower than letting people buy a vaccine off the shelf. The military has no special advantage here. There are great reasons that the military isn't left in charge of running a countries logistics networks - they are competent but not the best at it.
Anyway, I'm happy to concede that the market will take about a month to figure out vaccine distribution. In fact, I said "a couple of weeks" in my original comment that said the market is "extremely slow." So I suspect we have the same actual time span in mind, it's just that you think that the description of that time is "quick" and I think it's "slow".
In particular, it sounds like you think it's quick by comparison to potential alternatives. But I'm saying it's slow by comparison to the author's argument - that additional days or weeks of delay cause serious exponential growth.
So we should at least ask what could be faster, before being satisfied with one month. I know of absolutely no way to make the market faster. I do know of ways to make the government more competent and faster, even if our current government agencies are not competent or fast.
For instance - do you think the military would take more than a month to do this?
(Also, the current government-run distribution regime is actually vaccinating healthcare workers, as we argue about this, and it's taken much less than a month from approval to getting real people vaccinated.)
That doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would you unable to implement your ideas if given money & resources in proportion to the value you are creating? Why do you need a politically charged environment with an opposition who disagrees with every aspect of your decision making process to implement your ideas?
And your ideas won't speed the government up, people keep putting good ideas up to improve government all the time then they get shot down in the political process. Congress is deeply unpopular for a reason, and it isn't that people are struggling to see where improvements could be made. The CDC isn't underfunded because the pandemic was unforeseeable, there have been warning signs that something like this could happen since SARS v1 in the early 2000s. It is underfunded because the political process is not an effective method of getting stuff done. As will probably be showcased again if there are any free market vs government rollout vaccine case studies of this next phase.
As plans go it could be boiled down to wanting Congress & the Trump administration put in charge. That isn't a very fleshed out plan, and the fleshy bits to it could reasonably be described as dodgy and unreliable.
> For instance - do you think the military would take more than a month to do this?
Yes. It is a big job.
> (Also, the current government-run distribution regime is actually vaccinating healthcare workers, as we argue about this, and it's taken much less than a month from approval to getting real people vaccinated.)
The healthcare workers have been dealing with the virus for 9 months now, they either have protections worked out or have already caught it. The most important thing, as the article notes, is ramping up production and mass deployments. I'm glad that they're vaccinated, but the most important thing at the moment is safety and raw numbers of people vaccinated, and not so much the targetting. I'd bet most of the healthcare workers who catch Covid catch it outside of work.
The fastest way to get mass vaccinations is to let companies sell vaccine shots to people who will pay them. The government can try to help by ordering a bunch of shots for people who can't otherwise pay.
That's just wrong. The Corona virus is hitting poor and minority populations much harder than wealthy white communities. This is what the free market is optimized to do. It's what Trump and most Republicans in congress truly believe is what's supposed to happen! This very issue is one of the fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats.
The point that the author is making, is that in the absence of any such plan, market mechanisms would have allowed many of the people with regards to whom it is a collective benefit for us all if they have received the vaccine -- first responders, people who have jobs that require them to travel or be in public, and people who want to party -- to actually be able to get it. The free market doesn't always optimize to what is best, but the author makes a reasonable argument that in this case it would. You don't seem to disagree with their analysis, just markets in general -- and that's a politicized, unhelpful approach.