Hacker News Reader

Comment by mchusma | Hacker News Reader

I don't follow this logic regarding this vaccine analogy. The government literally banned the use of many safe and effective vaccines entirely for almost a year, and every government has still banned some. They set the price, have banned it's sale.

Regardless of what you think of the vaccine effort, I don't think anyone would look at the covid vaccine effort and see it as the government staying out of it.

View on HN

There's another analogy to be made here.

If most countries weren't doing lockdowns all over the world to the tune of billions of dollars lost - the incentives for developing vaccines so quickly would be much smaller.

Giving a grant for 10 million dollars to 10 companies that might have a shot at developing the vaccine is one thing. Banning almost all business worldwide till the vaccine is developed redirects almost all the money in the world towards developing that vaccine.

If governments banned fossil fuels ignoring the economic consequences for a few years - we would solve global warming no problem. The alternatives would get developed in record time because of how much money they would be immediately worth.

But the suffering in the meantime caused by the regulations don't seem as justifiable in case of global warming as it did in case of Covid lockdowns, so governments won't do this for global warming (or at least - not until people start dying of global warming in big numbers).

The alternatives would be so expensive that nobody could afford them. Without fossile fuels nobody would even bother to build them because of the cost and trouble. Without fossile fuels there wouldn´t even be any planes and trucks available to deliver materials for development and production. Ban fossile fuels and civilization will collapse in a day.

Natural depletion on a finite planet is like banning, but slower. End result will be the same.

Weren't the RNA vaccines developed in a matter of days? It's the testing that takes awhile and there's no way to speed that up since the goal is to validate effectiveness and side effects over time.

With banning fossil fuels, how are you so sure it would be a net gain? I think you underestimate how dependent much of the world is on fossil fuels. Are you willing to let populations starve or freeze to death to solve global warming?

> It's the testing that takes awhile and there's no way to speed that up

How many test subjects were immunised at 3am?

If the testing was on the critical path, there would be no good reason to wait till 9am the next day to start testing.

Yet as far as I'm aware, no testing was done at 3am immediately after lab certification at 2:57am...

This is one example of many where the vaccine development effort fell far short of the effort society should have put into it.

Sure, but is 6 hours all that significant when the trial needs to be multiple months in duration?

IMO we should instead focus on options like a rapidly expanding trial.

Hundreds of people die every hour from this.

Is it worth having a few people have to get up at an inconvenient time to save a thousand lives?

"Obviously" it would not be a total ban, even with strict lockdowns, essential workers (like supermarket workers, food truckers) were still allowed to work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com