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Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

I do not care one single iota about who was first or paid most. What is clear is that people are dying unnecessarily because of this competition. The ethical thing would to be minimise the number of people dying of covid-19.

Distributing these vaccines evenly based upon risk factors (age, BMI, ...) is what should have happened. Practical example:

- My double marathon running, under 40 brother in law in Israel is low risk. He should not have received the vaccine yet, even if I like him.

- My heavily overweight 71 years old father is high risk. He should have received the vaccine already.

The EU, the UK, the US, Israel _and_ most of the manufacturers failed abysmally at this.

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Straight out disagree. One of the most fundamental purposes of a country is to prioritize the interests (and most fundamentally life) of its own citizens.

If countries agreed on things like resource distribution, human rights, economic structure, reward incentives, culture, there would be no need for different nations.

This is purely a negotiation. "Ethics" is a weak appeal stemming from a failure to plan, invest, and execute.

The loyalties of a country's government should absolutely be with its constituents. That loyalty does not necessarily mean that the health of its inhabitants only should be the government's concern.

I can perfectly imagine a healthy 40 years old UK constituent supporting the idea that a 80 years old EU constituent should get priority over him. Or the other way round obviously, should that situation ever occur. Governments could take that into account, but we don't even have to go down that contentious rabbit hole to find points of consensus.

I just happen to think that an opportunity to reach a Pareto optimum was missed in negotiations, particularly between the UK and the EU.

Would an agreement on proportionality in vaccine distribution really have been so difficult between the EU and the UK for example? That would have produced real advantages for both sides.

Both governments can harm each other's vaccine supplies, and it's increasingly looking like that could also become reality. That's lose-lose instead of win-win.

The problem with that is that in reality, there's very little the UK can do to supply the EU with a meaningful number of vaccines. You've got to remember that the UK has less than a sixth the population of the EU and doesn't have much local pharmaceutical manufacturing. What Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing we do have only has enough capacity to supply part of the UK demand as, basically, a back-up plan in case everyone goes vaccine nationalist and bans exports.

Any real solution to the EU's vaccination problem basically has to involve fixing their vaccine supply chains, not getting magical extra vaccines from somewhere else because there is no supply of vaccines from elsewhere that could fill their gaps. All the rabble-rousing about UK-made vaccines from the European Commission and the rest of the EU is just an attempt to distract from that because the actual cause is really politically inconvenient for the people trying to blame the UK.

> I do not care one single iota about who was first or paid most.

This is 100% guaranteed method to get shitty vaccine development and production in the future.

Money is the ultimate incentive - instead of haggling down they should have measured the cost of damages caused by delayed vaccination and tried to outbid.

This idiotic notion that we should prevent pharma companies from profiting on this is exactly why nobody wants to do vaccine development in the first place.

More than that they should have helped invest in production im hope that things would work. The US wwasn't known as a vaccine production power before, but with some investment we have a significant supply now.

Does that even make sense?

What if your 71 year old father is an agoraphobic hermit and your brother has some wonder job that puts him in a position to literally save the lives of other people as long as he's in close proximity to them.

I understand this is a hard to credit hypothetical but in those circumstances or similar ones we might want your brother at the head of the line. Not because he's more likely to die but because he's more likely to infect me. Or say, any hypothetical fellow citizen.

Frankly I think the most critical thing is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. Any other criteria should come after "as many as quickly." After that sure, have an argument over if more important to get people who might die vaccinated or people who might spread it vaccinated. Knock yourself out - but don't get in the way of the critical thing.

> Distributing these vaccines evenly based upon risk factors (age, BMI, ...) is what should have happened.

this is exactly what the UK has been doing?

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/17157/production...

I suspect the poster was saying that 80 year olds in India should receive the vaccination before 50 year olds in New York

The good part is that they are.

> The ethical thing would to be minimise the number of people dying of covid-19.

Yes and when the EU delays signing contracts, and focuses so much on price, they cause more people to die from covid by slowing the process along.

I agree that the best way forward would have been to minimize deaths of covid, by them not worrying so much about prices and instead supporting development of the vaccine as quickly as possible.

Is that at all possible on the time scales we're talking about? It depends so much on the distribution networks, health services, willingness of population and everything else of each individual country.

Unless I read this wrong. You are seriously suggesting that we should do global risk-factor prioritization? Meaning that the 50year olds in New York are not allowed to take their doses until 70 year old anti-vaxxerss in the Slovenian alps have had theirs?

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