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Comment by luch | Hacker News Reader

Several epidemiologist are trying to warn the developed nations that the current battle for covid vaccines provisioning is doing the world a disservice since it allows the virus to mutate in parts of the world that can't compete economically for vaccine shots (Manaus, South Africa, etc.)

But Nash equilibrium is still more powerful than everything else ...

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Since we don't have enough doses or dosing capacity yet to make anywhere reach herd immunity, not even tiny Israel (although hopefully they are getting close), it's not like shipping everything to South Africa would change anything. Also, given the refrigeration requirements of the early vaccines, shipping it to lower income countries would probably just increase the chance of some of the doses spoiling.

Really, it's in virtually every country, so there's not a place on Earth where it's not mutating.

That doesn't matter. Any person that isn't vaccinated is a potential source of a mutation. It doesn't matter where that person is.

Once a country reaches herd immunity, then by all means get vaccines to other countries, but until then non-vaccinated people are fungible.

You are forgetting animal hosts. Numerous other species also transmit.

Same thing: those animal hosts are everywhere. There is no particular reason to expect that an animal host in Isreal won't be the source of the next mutation (Israel is currently number 1 in per-capita vaccination)

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