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Comment by ErikVandeWater | Hacker News Reader

One element I never see discussed is even if the vaccine had no side effects for children, since there is a limited supply of vaccines, inoculating a child in the USA means someone (probably older, less healthy) somewhere else is not getting it. It's totally understandable for US politicians to value the life of a US resident higher than that in another country, but we should discuss how much more valuable that life is.

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i think you see this rarely discussed because its an issue that is rapidly declining in importance over time.

The trade off of either-this-US-kid-gets-it-or-that-Indian-adult-gets-it becomes less severe when availability of vaccines is going up everywhere rapidly.

Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose.

so, scarcity is certainly the case sometimes (like right now for Paxlovid) but not for general availability vaccines worldwide.

> Where vaccine availability is low, its not due to US hoarding but rather due to regional government policy constraints that wouldn't be alleviated if this-US-kid gave up their dose.

Pharmaceutical companies would invest more in finding ways around regional constraints if they didn't have a free profit square by selling their vaccines in the US.

Perfect vaccine distribution across the entire world isn’t realistic.

Perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to vaccine distribution. We could waste months or years trying to get all of the vaccines to the “right” people first, or we could start vaccinating as many people as possible in whatever order makes it fastest. The latter option produces significantly better outcomes compared to waiting to try to distribute it globally according to some specific order.

For a member of the US there is no limit as to how much more valuable a US resident life should be. If the choice is between saving a US citizen or a resident of another country, you must choose the US citizen.

Why?

I might get downvoted but I want to answer you honestly:

It’s part of American folklore and culture, we do not always live up to our higher ideals but as Americans we take care of our own.

Yes possibly it’s national narcissism but there you have it.

Thank you. For me if I had the choice between a fellow country person and some other random individual in the world I'd first look at their relative ages and if the difference is significant I'd pick the younger one.

But I've lived outside of my country for quite a big chunk of my life and don't really have a strong connection to our 'national identity', I don't have a flag and I don't care about our royal family.

There is also the benefit of knowing that if you are a US citizen, other US citizens would prioritize saving you vs foreign aliens, no matter what.

Every nation strives to protect its own first and foremost (obviously there are exceptions where the leaders were bad or their interests diverged too much but in general it holds). People are valuable. Every institution in the US runs on them and their productive output.

What benefit does your continued existence, or some random farmer in India, or some random taxi driver in Chile confer the US vs some overweight middle manager who pays fat taxes on his 200k income and does his part to keep a local liquor store in business?

It might not pass western morals but the game theory side seems pretty obvious to me.

You are touching on an important subject: COVID-19 is a global problem, not a set of disjoint local problems, and only a global plan of attack has any realistic chance of success. As long as things are bad in just one country and assuming normal connectivity between that one country and the rest of the world the next mutation is almost a sure thing. But even a global plan of attack is getting harder to implement every day. Yesterday the world saw almost 1.9 million new confirmed cases. Each of those is a potential breeding ground for new mutations.

What would a global plan of attack look like? Who coordinates it and who decides when they've been successful?

- synchronized vaccination drive

- WHO

- measure the spread, hospitalizations and deaths before and after, though, absent a control (see: global) there will of course always be people that will argue that it wasn't the vaccines that did it.

There's a surplus of vaccine right now. You need to go get on a high horse so you can see.

And in the same line of thinking that vaccination is a world the more the virus spreads through people that cannot fight it (naturally or via vaccines) the more the change of mutations apearing and spreading.

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