IHAQ wrote: ↑Fri Feb 05, 2021 3:10 pm
Well, we don't know what cinepro's point was as he didn't explain. Let's give him chance to do so.
There is no "point." The discussion was focused on the LDS leaders, but there were a lot of variables at play (their ages, their religion, their races, their genders/biological sex etc.) In order to get some better perspective on how people are judging the situation, I thought it would be helpful to introduce a comparison.
So for those who are upset by the idea of >70yo LDS leaders getting vaccinated (probably with some sort of preferential scheduling), does it bother your more or less to have John Dehlin getting vaccinated? On what basis are you making that judgement? What assumptions are you making, and to what degree are you basing your feelings on the science? From a scientific standpoint, if there was one vaccine left and you had to choose between Russell M. Nelson or Dehlin, who would you choose if you wanted to save the most lives and end the pandemic as soon as possible?
I would also like to circle back to the Lem's accusation that the LDS leader's vaccinations were "unethical, possibly illegal." What law might have been broken?
Also, people seem to have expectations of "fairness" or randomness in the distribution of vaccines. Where is this coming from? Has the government or those in charge ever stated that the vaccine distribution would be random? Because it seems plainly evident that the distribution isn't random or first-come first served. At some point, a pool of vaccines are made available to selected tiers of people by what appears to be a "random" appointment system, but even that isn't "random" (the pool is selective). And before those vaccines are made available, many people have already been selected (for example, health care workers at hospitals that get vaccine shipments get their shots before those who work at hospitals that don't get vaccine shipments).
In a perfect world, there would be nothing "random" or "first-come, first-served" about vaccine distribution. It would be precisely targeted to get vaccines quickly to those who are most likely to die (end points) or spread the virus (nodes), and to get it to them very quickly. We don't live in a perfect world, so logistics and bureaucracy introduces some degree of randomness and inefficiency into the process (preferring speed over precision). But that doesn't mean the process is
required to be random, nor should we mistake that for being a desired outcome.
The most "equitable" outcome is one that ends the pandemic as soon as possible, with as little death and hospitalization as possible. And that outcome would not be most quickly or efficiently achieved from randomness. Randomness is a bug, not a feature.