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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

That's still kind of a pathetic amount when you consider how wealthy the US is and how many vaccines are needed globally.

The reluctance to invest in production capacity demonstrated by both the Trump administration and the Biden administration is disappointing. People like to reply to points like this by highlighting the unambitious investments that did get made. I don't pretend to know what the actual limits of production are, but I'm pretty skeptical that we got near them.

Edit: A year after it was reasonably clear we had viable vaccines, we are something like 10 billion doses short of global coverage. That's what I am comparing 100 million to.

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Just to be clear.

Government wealth comes from tax collection and from the people. While we want to help the world there are constraints on how much we can do.

The general sentiment I get from most people is that banding together to save the lives of others is a moral imperative, and unwillingness to do so is selfish.

I don't think I am mischaracterizing this, am I?

I don't think you are but it is nuanced. Our two sentiments are not incompatible. Focusing on self first is not inherently selfishness.

"You can't help others if you yourself are in need of help."

"Before You Help Others, You Must First Help Yourself"

"Before you assist others, always put your oxygen mask on first."

"Self-sufficiency is a prerequisite to charity."

> Focusing on self first is not inherently selfishness.

Agreed, but focusing on self-only is proclaimed to be selfish, is it not? Have Western nations not had the means for many years to dramatically decrease deaths in foreign countries for relatively modest sacrifices?

There are certainly no shortage of persuasive memes, platitudes, and general rhetoric that exert significant influence on people's perception of this matter, but I prefer addressing it from a strict epistemic perspective.

Fact: United States is the #1 provider of foreign aid on the plantet [1]

That fact is not compatible with the assertion of focusing on self only.

to your point:

Sure.

But as so often happens the only disagreement we really have is the level at which aid is given.

Shall we not just give away everything for the greater good until we have nothing left?

I don't suppose to have perfect knowledge of the exactly balance we can give with out reducing our self to a position of requiring then help from others.

It's dishonest to ignore all the aid we give around the world.

So if giving the most aid of any country is not enough...

What amount is enough?

[1] https://www.wristband.com/content/which-countries-provide-re...

It's pretty likely that giving away many more covid vaccines would have been a net benefit to the material wealth of the US, so this is sort of a diversion, talking about other aid that doesn't have the same dynamic (vaccines are cheap and carry huge benefits).

Look. Your mind is made up. I don't wanna watch a bunch of axe grinding. The USA is evil in your book. No amount of logic will convince you.

A bunch of pharmacies threw out expired vaccine doses.

Obviously there is a sinister conspiracy here.

Don't presume to speak my thoughts.

I don't think the US is evil, I think people have a poor understanding of how little it would cost to help the rest of the world a lot more with vaccination and am disappointed that we are not doing it.

> But as so often happens the only disagreement we really have is the level at which aid is given.

> Shall we not just give away everything for the greater good until we have nothing left?

It's not the disagreement that I find interesting, it's the consistency between the claimed ideology (and the self-righteous, hyper-confident manner in which it is often delivered) preached by The Righteous when it comes to certain parts of COVID, combined with the "That's different/Whataboutism!" card that is played when things are not quite to the liking of these people, or the interesting way in which they calculate "selfishness" with 100% confidence in their correctness, while typically being unable/unwilling to give even a pseudocode explanation of how they calculate it.

> It's dishonest to ignore all the aid we give around the world.

I am not denying that America is the most generous nation on the planet, it is the self-righteous and hypocritical attitude of many Americans that I think is interesting.

> What amount is enough?

I think one's walk should match one's talk.

There is no real substance in this response. Your argument has run out of steam and has no legs to stand on. There is so much incoherence that it's not worth refuting. I believe you to be a good person though and I wish you the best.

This may be the most interesting response I have ever gotten on HN, and I have seen some doozies.

I doubt this is a compliment.

I truly don't see how I can constructively respond to your previous post. We have reached an impasse and I wish you the best.

It is a compliment in some sense of the word.

I mean, that's a story book simplification. Look at the mobilization for World War II. The decision to do it had more than 0 impact on the resources that ended up being available (I'm being droll; the decision had an enormous impact).

The US could start paying (the reasonable, cost based) price for every single Covid 19 vaccination that takes place and forget about it, it isn't that big a sum of money. Meanwhile, we've, by choice, only done a bit.

The Trump and Biden administrations both invested heavily in vaccine production. And while the US is wealthy, it’s not wealthier than all of the other countries combined, and yet it is donating more vaccine than all other countries combined.

The Trump and Biden administrations both invested heavily in vaccine production.

This is what I disagree with. They picked relatively low targets and invested against those. Modestly larger investments would likely have been able to increase production rates well beyond where they are right now. And it's production rate that is the bottleneck, not the decision to donate or whatever.

> Modestly larger investments would likely have been able to increase production rates well beyond where they are right now.

Citation needed. Scaling an industry from nothing in a year is a herculean task. I’m a staunch Trump critic, but Operation Warp Speed worked pretty well (if only because DJT got out of the way). The production rates are damn impressive and it’s not like anyone had any idea about how much vaccine we would be able to produce or how quickly. Arguments from hindsight aren’t particularly convincing.

The spending they did do was probably illegal (glad they did it). They took ~$10 billion from other programs. Why didn't Congress allocate $50 billion?

The piece the New York Times did on production of the Pfizer vaccine makes it pretty clear that a lot of the production is not new (bioreactors and the like). I realize it isn't trivial to do that sort of production, and don't really disagree with "Arguments from hindsight aren't particularly convincing.", but I also haven't seen a single piece of information on what fundamental limit was run into. The mixing of the mRNA and lipids got a lot of attention, but there wasn't any clear 'here's why we can't go twice as fast' information published, as far as I saw.

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