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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

No need to worry about who should go first. They will be rolling it out based on need.

When it's available to you, go get it.

this is exactly it. based on my demographic, i'm going to be one of the last in line.

I'm not going to be trying to jump ahead in that line because i'm not an asshole and i know other people need it more than I do. but also I'm a little bit of an asshole, so i'm kind of reassured to know that hundreds of millions of people will have gotten it before me, and if there are any issues there will have been plenty of time to sort them out.

The other half of it, for the early days at least, is the fear of lining up with hundreds of people who are more likely to be high risk people. Putting yourself in higher risk.

My pharmacy does COVID testing but only if you show no symptoms. The gov health networks tell symptomatic people to be tested in hospital set up centers. But high risk people are still high risk people, whether they are showing symptoms or not.

It's worth separating the two types of 'high risk': There's 'high risk of having a severe response to COVID' and 'high risk of getting COVID'. The former (e.g. elderly) are not always the same as the latter (healthcare workers) - but there are some overlaps (e.g. care homes).

My hunch is most of the queues for vaccines will be type A e.g. the elderly. Not necessarily more likely to have COVID, but more likely to be at risk of severe symptoms if they were to get it.

I have enough faith in my local health authorities to assume that the line won't be a literal lineup with hundreds of people.

If my local bike shop has figured out the concept of no-contact service appointments by now, I'm pretty sure the health department can do it.

idk about where you live but in Toronto 3+ million people will have to be vaccinated. It's going to be a chaotic mass experiment in the first few weeks. Which I intend to wait out.

CVS does a complete no touch COVID testing via the drive thru.

We don’t have that in then city I live in. I just remember the lines for H1N2 that went out the door and took an hour and required you to sit there for 10min in case you had a reaction.

Not sure why you would think a vaccine being managed by the government will be rolled out in a sane and consistent manner?

edit As was correctly pointed out, I should mention I'm speaking purely about the US and not any other country.

because believe it or not some people live in countries where the government manages to do just that.

I have already watched wealthy people in Germany and France and China skip the queue.

Outside clinical trials nobody in Germany or France has been vaccinated as there are no approved vaccines in those countries.

> nobody in Germany or France has been vaccinated as there are no approved vaccines

Which creates a force field around the warehouses in which it sits? Come on.

I guess I’ll revise to I know of people with substantial resources, hundreds of millions and billions at their disposal, who have been injected with something they believe to be the Pfizer vaccine.

I'm sure it's possible, but that means effectively that said person is now an undocumented trial participant. They have gotten injected with an unapproved medical product. That's a risk they've taken in order to get in early. The physician that administered it has also committed a crime that can cost them their license to practice.

There are easier ways for people in power to get vaccines. In China, the government has granted exceptional permissions to vaccinate a number of people with a vaccine that has not yet completed phase 3 trials. The list of people who qualify for that vaccine is said to be several million people long. It's much easier to get on said list in China than it is anywhere else. A number of other governments have also made exceptions for political leaders and such, treating them with non-approved medication or vaccines. For example, the sheikh of Dubai has been vaccinated with the Sinopharm vaccine before approval (in a very public display of faith in said vaccine, in order to promote vaccination to the population). Some countries are saying they won't bother waiting for phase 3 trials to end on some products and will make vaccines generally available based on current data. This is the case for Russia (with Sputnik-V) and Morocco (with the Sinopharm vaccine). I consider it highly likely that their heads of state are vaccinated under an exceptional authorization.

JumpCrisscross is on point here, the level of naivte in the discussion is a little much.

This is a global pandemic, trials with 30 000 patients x 5, each one of those vials worth an absolute fortune, there's a 100% chance quite a bit of it has fled into the black market and a sophisticated one at that.

And to wit - there are a lot of people being 'officially' vaccinated right now behind the scenes they're not going to tell us about.

It might be dangerous for politicians to get it early, because if asked by reporters either they have to lie, or say 'yes' and then public outcry.

Special Forces, the Secret Service and some other security personal - just a some examples are going to get it long before we plebes. Among others.

To be clear, you know multiple super rich people that were able to get a vaccine out of a -70C warehouse and keep it refrigerated while it was delivered to them?

A more promising vaccine was developed in January 2020 and requires only -4C

https://www.cell.com/med/fulltext/S2666-6340(20)30027-1

and has had good results in trials from March.

The link in your comment doesn't have anything to do with what you've said.

OK, try this. https://www.thecut.com/2020/11/a-second-covid-vaccine-may-be...

Also, I'm guessing that JumpCrissCross doesn't know specifically that it is the Pfizer vaccine. It could be the Moderna one.

What do you mean, "try"? You said

> A more promising vaccine was developed in January 2020 and requires only -4C

Which vaccine is this? The link you just posted talks about Moderna, which started trials in August.

OK, try this: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vac...

Also quote ..

>as early as July the MIT Technology Review reported that a group of 70 scientists in the orbit of Harvard and MIT, including “celebrity geneticist” George Church, were taking a totally DIY nasal-spray vaccine,

Thank you for clarifying. It's unfortunate it took so long for their trials to start.

This person specifically said it was the pfizer vaccine.

Skip the queue for what? Did they get the vaccine already before it was approved?

This is likely complete misinformation. Why is there so much misinformation on HN today?

> Did they get the vaccine already before it was approved?

Yup. It’s sitting in warehouses ready for distribution. No idea how. And no idea how they trusted it to be legitimate.

Supply chain integrity is a huge issue that normies take for granted. The surest way to lose normie friends is to point out how much faith people put in supply chains.

Or alternately, what the GP is really telling us is that the rich and powerful are easily duped into spending their money on placebos.

> the rich and powerful are easily duped into spending their money on placebos

That was frankly my line of questioning. But at least in the German case, the vials and packaging looked legitimate. And it was a reputable doctor administering it at their home who claimed to have directly procured it, though I’m sure that meant warehouse workers or something in the middle, so who knows.

If that is the case everyone involved is playing an exceptionally dangerous game and I can't imagine that this would be the norm, especially since I suspect the thieves will get greedy and screw up quickly.

> everyone involved is playing an exceptionally dangerous game

Agree. From how prevalently I watched tests get mis-allocated a few months ago, however, I’m not optimistic about enforcement. Particularly given the political implications it would have for the leaders in power, who are supposed to be doing a better job at this.

I think pre-emptive enforcement of something like this is extremely difficult without getting downright creepy and invasive. The best you can do is drop the hammer on anyone greedy and dumb enough to get caught - and I'm sure there will be some of these! But personally, I prefer vaccines where the chain of custody didn't require massive bribery and risk-taking.

Then you should contact the medical board or whatever the German equivalent is and tell them about this "reputable" doctor. They'd at least lose their license, and for good reason.

Looked legitimate? Do you have any idea how cheap a label maker is?

This could use some elaboration. Have you been in all three of those countries recently? Or "watched" meaning "saw people talking about online" or such? Or something in between?

I was in Germany in October and with the individual the day they took the second shot. France is a professional contact who mentioned it on the phone, as is China.

Same thing happened with tests a few months ago in Palo Alto. Billionaires with boxes of them at their homes while public stocks ran low.

If billionaires want to take part to the clinical trials go ahead. I mean they look for volunteers all the times.

PS: They were no COVID vaccine in October but clinical trials.

Even taking all this at face value, I think the reason so many of your comments are downvoted is that they're sort of off topic for the original suggestion, which was that the government should not be trusted to handle rollout of the vaccine in a safe or fair manner. That would include giving people in positions of power or with a lot of wealth some loophole to legally be vaccinated ahead of schedule.

What you're talking about is literally a black market. The people you are hanging out with are literally criminals, who are at best injecting themselves with an unknown substance provided by criminal doctors. Most of us probably wish to see such people prosecuted.

Okay so first of all I'm almost certain no approved vaccine existed in October, the first one started rollout this week, can you back this up with a source?

Maybe you knew someone participating in a study but that's not queue skipping.

Don't get me wrong I hate billionaires but this just seems like it can't factually be correct.

It doesn't need to be approved to be used, and the results of the trial were likely known for a bit now.

It's easily conceivable that billionaires have been pushing to be 'in the loop' on the meds from the start, and will have gained access long ago to whatever was used in the most promising trials. They can take it as soon as the insider doctors flag that it's ok, likely many weeks before any public announcement, and certainly before any governmental validation.

The value of said vaccines are considerable, there's massive money involved, I wonder if the R&D institutions themselves may have been able to find a loophole to allow for it.

With the sheer number of doctors and patients involved in the trial, and vials worth possibly $100-500K on the black market ... it's bound to get out.

And frankly, who cares? A couple thousand early vaccines is basically meaningless from a public health standpoint. It might even be moral to have publicly auctioned off the first mini batch and put the money into production. It's rational because the 'willingness to pay' of some billionaires for the almost arbitrary early access to a vaccine which will soon be cheap and plentiful ... works well as a 'win win' both for the buyer, and society.

Another possibility is these billionaires were scammed. It can't be too difficult to forge a label and place it on a flu vaccine vial.

They had boxes of which vaccine? They all need to be refrigerated. Is this something you saw, heard about second hand or something you read on an open internet forum?

> They had boxes of which vaccine?

Boxes of the test kits. I was giving precedence. Frankly surprised this is news to so many people. It’s well known in e.g. D.C. circles.

What you have said so far isn't consistent enough to make sense. You said boxes of the vaccine, now you are saying test kits. Test kits have been publicly available, there is no reason a company or a person couldn't buy them. That is not the same as having someone sneak a vaccine out of a -70C warehouse while keeping it refrigerated.

Sorry, you're right, I'm speaking about my country explicitly.

In the UK this is being managed by the NHS (someone correct me if this is incorrect). They do this every year for managing the Flu Virus.

In the UK I don't think anybody has a clue what anybody else is doing :')

I know the anti-administration circle jerk is pretty strong here but the administration actually doesn't have much of any control over the roll-out plan. I have physician friends with reservations for vaccinations as early as next week. There are hundreds of people working on the roll-out plan.

Trump isn't sitting in the Oval deciding which Walgreens are getting the vaccine when.

The US has managed to get the population vaccinated previously, and adults will be in charge of the executive again in a month or so. Unfortunately, that’s too late when it comes to ordering enough of the mRNA vaccines, but it will help to have the pandemic taken seriously.

Wait, I just realized now that universal free vaccination might not be a thing in the US. I live in a developing country with 200 million people, and the dozen or so most common vaccines are free to everyone, and everyone gets it and it is managed by the government. I'm sorry, but it works. Government here has /many/ faults, but managing vaccination for 200+ million's not really one of them.

The coronavirus vaccine is free in the US.

Pretty much, but it's not all covered by Uncle Sam.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is paying for the vaccine doses. It is up to individual's insurance plan to pay for administration of the vaccine. I'm not sure how that works for somebody who lacks insurance.

More details: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/28/health/cms-medicare-covid-vac...

Well, I mean you could go review their plans, if you are so concerned. They will begin vaccinating any day now.

If you're in the US, you can look at the federal planning as well as the plans for your state most likely. From what I've seen, they look pretty reasonable.

So your argument is "government bad". I counter with "government good". See how productive this discussion is?

I think his argument was "government is typically inefficient." is your counterclaim that government is typically efficient?

My claim is that "government bad" and similar broad brush claims about government are completely lacking in content.

But to your point, from sending humans into space to clearing snow off the roads, "government" absolutely destroys the private sector in efficiency and effectiveness for many important things. I'd rather let the CDC work on vaccine distribution protocols than leave it to Taco Bell.

> similar broad brush claims about government are completely lacking in content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_government_respon...

Or, specifically:

> Due to the slow response to the hurricane, New Orleans's top emergency management official called the effort a "national disgrace" and questioned when reinforcements would actually reach the increasingly desperate city.[10] New Orleans's emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert blamed the inadequate response on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). "This is not a FEMA operation. I haven't seen a single FEMA guy", he said. "FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."[10]

On COVID:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelyncorley/2020/04/10/us-g...

I think that two colossal failures are enough to convey a "The government responds inefficiently and generally poorly to significant humanitarian issues".

> absolutely destroys the private sector in efficiency and effectiveness for many important things.

Maybe. Lots of private sector work is held up specifically _by_ government.

> I'd rather let the CDC work on vaccine distribution protocols than leave it to Taco Bell.

I mean... I agree. But I never suggested we leave vaccines in the hands of chain businesses. I just pointed out that, historically, the US government botches jobs like this spectacularly. The confidence lots of these comments have in the govt efficiently distributing the vaccinations based on need, to me, is not in line with the realities of the US government wrt issues of public health and safety.

As someone else already pointed out, my claim was in fact "government is massively inefficient", with a wealth of evidence to support this claim.

I mean....Republicans have spent 40 years breaking government so they can prove themselves correct.

You're assuming distribution will work fairly and optimally. That's very unlikely, especially because the initial rollout will still be overseen by the Trump admin.

You’re assuming that everyone talks about the USA, but they probably don’t.

I find this on the internet, though usually reddit rather than here. I am forever asking folks if they mean the US, and trying to explain to them that there is... a rest of world

America is the largest (primarily) English speaking community in the world and both Reddit and YC are US companies. It's not surprising some assume the whole audience is American.

The US accounts only for about 10% of English speakers in the world.

Honestly it's kind of hard to know what the audience for a site might be. If people are active during your hours and in your language, the assumption is easy to make.

Oh boy, do I hope we don't talk about the US in 2021, anymore. It's been like a slightly different, ever the same car crash you drive by, every day. For four fucking years. I am sure my dopamine receptors look like old, all dries up raisins by now. I wish we as a species could agree stop all news for year or ten. Detox and heal, form new habits like life has value and shit.

It will be overseen by the individual states in the US.

You mean the admin that funded and fast-tracked the development and trials?

You mean the admin that encouraged people not to wear masks? The one that downplayed the virus at every opportunity? The one that held rallies without masks required, but still had people sign waivers in case they got sick?

Is it that one, or some other administration you’re thinking of?

You have a good counter. To add to "don't wear masks" though - WHO, CDC, Fauci all had poor and inaccurate guidance as well. It's like none of these experts have sane defaults when they don't know about something. Kind of hard to believe, really.

Then when they're wrong - they say "oh yeah we lied, we didn't want a run on masks for health workers". Such BS. They didn't know non-surgical/non-(k)n95 masks could be useful.

It's ok to admit when you're wrong. Better than saying you lied. Especially when there's enough distrust of government.

The US administration is culpable. But so are the experts. People need to be able to trust their experts.

Separately - I find it ridiculous we have people that are all about science, except when their agenda conflicts.

We end up with exceptions for religion. Exceptions for protests. Exceptions for filming movies. Whatever. If you have enough influence or can cause enough outrage about something you can get your way.

Nobody has the balls to take hard stances. They create these illogical plans based on who is influencing them.

Is there any official who was consistent and pragmatic with their pandemic plan?

The CDC officially recommended the use of face masks in public places on April 3.

That was forever ago and only a few weeks into the US crises(couple weeks after first lockdowns started). There absolutely was a PPE shortage at the time, and there absolutely was new information coming in about the efficacy of wearing non N95 masks. That's a lot of attribution to malice or incompetence for such a dynamic situation that shaped up in such a relatively short amount of time..

Meanwhile the current admin had their last maskless rally what, just in the past week or so?

My point is that if you're an expert that people are supposed to trust - you shouldn't make statements about things you don't know yet.

You seem to be ok glossing over that because you want to talk about the current admin when I'm not even talking about that. I agree with the culpability there.

Fauci - In March he said "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask" [1] The CDC and WHO were doing the same.

Also regarding the lie, "“We were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and public face head of the federal government’s coronavirus response, told The Street in an interview this week." [2]

You can go utilitarian if you want and say that's cool. Maybe you are ok with them lying to you because you believe them and think that was their only option. My point stands that there's enough distrust of the government. I don't believe they should do that, connect a lie to experts we are supposed to trust, and I don't believe that was their only option to prevent a shortage.

A lot of incompetence.

#1 not having enough masks in the first place, replenishing our supply

#2 talking about things they don't know and

#3 because they were incorrectly claiming cloth masks weren't useful for the public, they ended up parlaying that into a lie to try and prevent a shortage.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23hvLiA2akE

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/dr-fauci-admits-feds-initi...

No, they mean the administration that still hasn't provided for adequate PPE, that turned down the offer of another 100 million doses of the 95% efficacy Pfizer vaccine, which is available now, and instead bought 300 million doses of the Astra-Zenica 62% efficacy vaccine, which does not meet the task force's minimum efficacy requirements and will not be available until summer.

Wasn't minimum efficacy 50% or greater?

seriosuly? You're arguing that what they did was OK because it was a little above minimum rather than going after the stuff that will help people in the US? They bought 300 million doses of a vaccine that is more relivant to the developing world.....

And even then, the first vaccine to be approved wasn't part of the warp speed program.

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