I’m also surprised how many people bragged about jumping ahead in line when elderly people with much higher mortality rates were still waiting for theirs. At least keep it to yourself.
We were able to schedule immediate appointments in an adjacent county populated by hardcore Trumpers. Upon arriving at the drive-through vaccination site, there was only one other car in the lot. No danger of cutting the line in that county.
My point is only, it's sometimes dangerous to throw stones without asking questions or getting the full picture first. Taking doses when you aren't qualified for them is overall a bad thing I think we can all agree.
It's was wild seeing rationalizations for bad behavior being invented before your very eyes in March.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article251823018.htm...
If we continue using mRNA vaccines in the future, I hope some of these logistics issues can be solved. I'd rather the system prevents this, or allows it to occur in an unambiguous way that doesn't cause people to hate each other, question each others' morals, rat each other out, etc. I wouldn't say people skipping the line were doing the right thing, but I'm even less convinced that it was wrong. This was a gray area unaddressed by public health officials.
Not true if you look at per capita numbers. Alameda had 0.39% spoiled.
I am sure that those decisions should be made by the state, not the individual 25-year old who decides that they are deserving of the vaccine now.
Also, many of those links that were floated around had equity codes embedded that were not supposed to be used by the general public, so would show appointments made available specifically for high-risk populations.
My general opinion is that people who skipped ahead in their 20s, especially in the Bay Area, were in the moral wrong.
It was a mess and IMO difficult to assign anyone in the moral right in the distribution of vaccines.
For example, looking at the vaccine distribution from a utilitarian perspective and not a political-agenda perspective it would have made sense to give the vaccine to healthcare workers first and then grocery workers next, as society in general will collapse if people are not able to get groceries. In a strictly calculative sense society doesn’t care if a few more old people in a nursing home die, but if grocery stores are closed there will be food riots/massive problems in a few days.
But politicians know that old people vote. So we had the age-tiered system.
IMO both if these perspectives were misguided and the optimal way to handle it would have been to had over vaccine logistics to Amazon who could actually make a web app that doesn’t crash to register for vaccines and just go first-come first-served.
Instead we had to try to register via Kroger (I think) who was using a chatbot to register people which was not very effective or high throughput. Costco had spaghetti code and had embedded way too much information in the page source, no idea who designed their signup page either.
This incompetence and unneeded beauracracy by the government literally cost lives.
If people vote and decide that this is the way that it is being done, then people should respect that. Circumventing rationing because you feel like you are more deserving in that context is unethical.
> utilitarian perspective and not a political-agenda perspective it would have made sense to give the vaccine to healthcare workers first and then grocery workers next, as society in general will collapse if people are not able to get groceries
Not at all clear that this is the conclusion to reach. Grocery store workers are much more likely to spread, but are also very unlikely to be killed by it. Elderly people are likely to be killed by it. Most epidemiological modeling showed that vaccinating the elderly first and as quickly as possible was the fastest way to mitigate deaths, not vaccinating coronavirus.
This is exactly why it is better to come to these decisions as a society, not let individuals who may very well come to incorrect judgements about what the socially optimal thing to do is.
> IMO both if these perspectives were misguided and the optimal way to handle it would have been to had over vaccine logistics to Amazon who could actually make a web app that doesn’t crash to register for vaccines and just go first-come first-served.
This is classic HN backseat driver-ism. First-come first-served would have been ineffective, because again, there were ample reasons why vaccinating the elderly first made sense.
You went from two groups ("populations that are more likely to get covid and/or die from it than quickly to young") to one ("young, affluent populations who are much less likely to die from it or get it") whereas the latter group overlaps with the group who is more likely to get Covid. People who have work with human contact are more likely to get it, whereas people who live sheltered are not likely to get it, nor spread it (which overlaps with elder group).
Anyway, none of this warrants skipping the queue. The queue is there for a reason, and we could draw a parallel with responsible disclosure. Sharing a vulnerability with your co employees so they can exploit it as well is not responsible disclosure. However, the guy responded in this thread and I am not convinced based on that post that it is a vulnerability. It seemed to be just open for 18+.
The only point I'm trying to make is that it was morally wrong to lie to skip ahead in the eligibility lines in March.
It seems to me that the important information would be: did anybody who was eligible fail to get vaccinated as a result of the extras dropping in? In your story the answer is no. In the other dude's story, it seems like we don't know. If his story is accurate then the answer is probably not because otherwise the people running the site would have told him "please don't do that because it might take doses away from the eligible". But who knows.
I just waited till it was generally available and the local website had appointments available. Added bonus is by waiting the vaccine trials run that much longer so you have more data that it is safe.
I’m the type of guy how likes to go to mediocre restaurants to avoid waiting in line for good ones, so maybe I’m just weird.
Will they really wait until all elderly are vaccinated first? This would never work.
Just give it to everyone and it goes faster. While we wait for old people to get vaccinated it still circulates among young, who come into contact with old and unvaccinated, hence not helping things.