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This is the wrong thing to complain about. At this point vaccine distribution is a zero-sum game. You might just as well frame it as "EU refrains from pushing i

• markus92 6y ago
  From a public health perspective, it's not zero sum. One country fully vaccinated and another equally sized country not vaccinated, leads to higher strain on the healthcare system than both countries 50% vaccinated. Pareto principle applies to hospitalizations.
• scrollaway 6y ago
  Very untrue. COVID being much, much higher-risk in top age brackets means vaccinating the top age brackets everywhere first is a lot more beneficial than vaccinating country-by-country. Same reason why your country (whichever it is) likely made priority groups for vaccine distribution rather than make it a free-for-all. And the first 15-20% or so of vaccines administered are CRITICAL. In true pareto principle, 80% of hospitalizations come from 20% of the population. I'm in Belgium. We are facing a third wave. We're going back into lockdown pretty soon (it's almost certain). With just 400k more vaccines administered, we would not be in this mess. 400k. The US vaccinates 3 million every day.
  • svara 6y ago
    The EU has received enough vaccine for everyone over 70-something. But it doesn't change anything about whether there's a third wave or not. If you chose not to do a lockdown in the third wave because "older people are already vaccinated" that would just mean that your hospitals would fill up with younger people instead, since total number infected would be much higher than ever before.
    • scrollaway 6y ago
      No, hospital patients are not magically younger when the old ones are vaccinated. If you vaccinate the old, hospitals don't just "fill up" with the young. There are just straight up less hospitalizations. The virus still spreads but the percentage of severe cases go way down. Which need i remind you is the reason why we do lockdowns at all: because without them, hospitals are overrun and there is a risk of a healthcare system collapse. The aim of the lockdown was never to eradicate the virus. It was to keep the healthcare system working.
      • krzyk 6y ago
        Sorry, hospitals in Poland started filling up with younger people. Virus mutates and if it can't infect elderly it will infect younger and does. Median age of hospitalized people is getting lower and we will soon see that vaccinating elderly wasn't the best choice (they don't spread COVID that much - don't take part in waves, are just victims to those).
        • scrollaway 6y ago
          Vaccines reduce but do not stop the spread, there is little evidence that vaccinating spreaders first would help much. And median age of hospitalizations going down is a good thing lol. It means the vaccines are doing their job. Look at death rates and instances of severe illness per infection, those should be going down as well: the disease is less harmful if its highest risk groups are vaccinated. (Are people here really having this hard of a time with basic statistics?)
          • svara 6y ago
            > (Are people here really having this hard of a time with basic statistics?) No, no one is disagreeing with the narrow point you're making that protecting the oldest leads to fewer bad outcomes given equal numbers of infections. But that's just one part of the story. In most of the EU, most people have not yet been exposed, so the pandemic will need to be ended by vaccination. The situation now is treacherous, since it may initially seem like hospitalizations don't track infections like they used to. But if the conclusion from that is to just open up, nothing will be gained. This is clearly borne out by both complex models and back of the envelope calculations. And that's ignoring that there are health issues other than death to consider...
  • rictic 6y ago
    > The US vaccinates 3 million every day. The US has like 30x as many people as Belgium. A better comparison would be Ohio, which has about the population of Belgium and is administering ~90k doses per day, which is sorta like vaccinating ~60k people a day (based off a guess that ~15k doses are the one dose J&J vaccine). I agree that prioritizing the most vulnerable, regardless of nationality is the morally better choice.
    • manmal 6y ago
      The US are vaccinating ~1% of their population every day. In the EU there are forecasts that we won’t finish before mid 2022.
    • scrollaway 6y ago
      What's your point? 400k is less than 4 percent of the belgian population. If we had vaccinated 4 percent more of our population, we would avoid a new lockdown, with all the economic implications it has on the country and Europe as a whole. Most other EU countries are in that same situation. Zero sum, it is not.
      • rictic 6y ago
        My point is that your post is clearer with per capita numbers and percentages.
      • morsch 6y ago
        Doubling your vaccination rate is nowhere close to enough to avoid a lockdown. Germany has vaccinated 9% (half dose or better) of the population and we're going back into lockdown. At 10%, there's still an endless number of old people left unvaccinated, and if you infect a large percentage of mid aged people, that alone is easily enough to wreck your health system.
        • scrollaway 6y ago
          You misread my numbers. We are already at the same numbers as germany, like most EU countries. Doubling it would take care of pretty much all 65+.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • krzyk 6y ago
    Actually it would be better to vaccinate spreaders first - those in 20-40 range. Because they spread COVID more than elderly, and also in old countries (like EU) 20-40 is a smaller group than 60+. Besides 20-40 range, also people that work at grocery stores, which are always open and can spread COVID. Elderly stay at homes have less contacts with other etc. There was a preprint regarding that in the US, but everyone focuses on deaths and doesn't think of causes.
    • scrollaway 6y ago
      The vaccines do not reduce spread that much, at least as far as we can tell.
      • krzyk 6y ago
        They do, study in Israel confirmed that at least Pfizer one reduces spread.