3 ms·
That stood out to me as well. There's a real opportunity cost to not moving more deliberately: those few extra months represent several hundred thousand lives l
by nkoren 6y ago
That stood out to me as well. There's a real opportunity cost to not moving more deliberately: those few extra months represent several hundred thousand lives lost. Could a vaccine be worse than that? Of course if the answer is yes, then that would be horrific -- you wouldn't want to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people and then discover that you've unintentionally shipped Thalidomide 2.0. But at the same time, the probability of such risks should be balanced against the certainties of what will happen without a vaccine.
Anybody who says that this is a simple or easy calculation frankly has no idea what they're talking about.
- ilikehurdles 6y agoIf it's a vaccine that does anything other than exactly what it's supposed to is going to erode public trust in any future vaccines that might actually work.
- ArkVark 6y agoCOVID has leapt from the realm of science and reason into fear and hysteria. If we 'saved' 1 million elderly people from dying of COVID, and they instead died over a period of time from vaccine side effects, those effects would be impossible to quantify via a binary PCR test and so would be ignored. Additionally if people were vaccinated, but still died, we could at least say 'oh well, we tried'. Rushing out a vaccine and giving it to people near the end of their natural lives is a completely legitimate decision to end this hysteria and get back to normal life.
- sobellian 6y agoElderly does not imply "near the end of their natural lives." Consider folks who are about to retire. They're certainly at risk but they still have a whole phase of their lives ahead of them.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoAgreed. Here it means, older than 50. Which is still running marathons, still having children, still working, still riding century rides for some.
- tinus_hn 6y agoUnfortunately these kind of calculations clash with ethics. You can’t take actions that cause people to die, even if they prevent more other people from dying.