Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

The CDC was also underfunded and the US's pandemic response budget had been slashed. The events of March are a damning indictment of letting small government do a big government's job, but not more than that.

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.)

> 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.

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.

> Coronavirus is not a poor-person-problem.

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.

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