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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

Did everyone miss the main premise of the article, which is that the distribution should be focused on reducing the r0? Yes, there was some stuff about free markets and such, but I think the main premise still has merit whether you're a socialist or a capitalist.

Why is no one discussing this? Giving a significant allocation to retirees instead of essential staff is the more compassionate thing, but is it the best?

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Because many commenters on this thread are angered by claims of free market superiority over government plan.

That's not what we are doing! Healthcare workers are in the initial allocation in most states. There's been all sorts of news featuring doctors and nurses getting shots.

Part of the reason is that it's easier to get healthcare workers near the freezers required to store the Pfizer vaccine, because many of those freezers are in hospitals.

Yes, I'm aware, but what about vaccinating restaurant, grocery, pharmacy, and meat packing workers?

Depending on the state, essential workers are near the front of the list as well. Those would likely include a subset of your list, but probably not restaurant workers.

There are anecdotes, sure, but I haven't seen any plan that in anyway appears to be in the same tone as the author's premise here. That is, ideally the objective statement would start with something around lowering the r0.

It's incorrect. The point of the response isn't to minimize R, it's to minimize harm. If that means minimizing R, then it means minimizing R. Here it doesn't - modeling shows that harm is minimized by vaccinating vulnerable populations even if they spread the virus less.

There is no possible way to target superspreaders, a lot of spreading happens in work or private situations we can’t know in advance who will spread it there. And the possible age groups are too large so we will see no effect immediately with the limited supply of vaccine. Starting with the eldest and those who are most likely to die from COVID should bring mortality down in the next 16 weeks. And afterwards we can work on reaching herd immunity.

To be frank, the people most likely to be super spreaders have mostly become infected by now and achieved natural immunity. 30+% of people in large portion of the country have likely been infected [0]. There are certainly some regions with much lower than average numbers that could theoretically still benefit from this strategy, but I agree that targeting would be very difficult and controversial.

[0]https://covid19-projections.com/infections/map_county_total_...

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