You're Nothing But A Number To Them -- Boosters, Bureaucratic Tyranny, and COVID (1 Viewer)

[The Z Machine]

As far as its corruption, the weird utilitarian arguments coming out of bioethics programs are famously odd. Witness Pete Singer out of Princeton, who argued for infanticide. He was considered by many a leader in the field of bioethics until then.

I'm not hitching my star to that "movement," which seems to have been ideologically captured by monstrous (as IK pointed out in another thread) people.

Well, he certainly flubbed that one... In any case, despite the Pete Singers out there, I don't think of bioethicists as monsters.  In fact I know one personally and she's anything but a monster.  I will admit I don't much about the discipline as I find philosophy to be terribly uninteresting.

 

[IvanKaramazov]

sure, lots of people can weight in to the conversation, but the devil is in the details, no?  Details like the mechanisms for the distribution (central vs. distributed, public vs. private) and the monitoring of vaccine uptake to address gaps in coverage by demographics and geography.  The people that are facile with that data are public health officials and researchers, no?  Is you issue that these people have opinions on policy rather than just being data and analysis gophers?

I think it's fine for health experts to have opinions about vaccine equity.  I just don't think those opinions are any more valuable than those of some random educated layperson. 

So if a panel of experts is making recommendations about whether the optimal vaccine dose is 50 mcg vs. 100 mcg, I'm all ears.  If that same panel of experts tells me that we should boost Americans before the third world gets a first dose, they're welcome to that view but I don't think the rest of us should assign any special weight to it.

 

[The Z Machine]

I think it's fine for health experts to have opinions about vaccine equity.  I just don't think those opinions are any more valuable than those of some random educated layperson. 

So if a panel of experts is making recommendations about whether the optimal vaccine dose is 50 mcg vs. 100 mcg, I'm all ears.  If that same panel of experts tells me that we should boost Americans before the third world gets a first dose, they're welcome to that view but I don't think the rest of us should assign any special weight to it.

So who should make up that panel of experts to weigh worldwide equity vs. vaccine nationalism?

 

[IvanKaramazov]

So who should make up that panel of experts to weigh worldwide equity vs. vaccine nationalism?

These folks.

 

[Rich Conway]

I think it's fine for health experts to have opinions about vaccine equity.  I just don't think those opinions are any more valuable than those of some random educated layperson. 

So if a panel of experts is making recommendations about whether the optimal vaccine dose is 50 mcg vs. 100 mcg, I'm all ears.  If that same panel of experts tells me that we should boost Americans before the third world gets a first dose, they're welcome to that view but I don't think the rest of us should assign any special weight to it.

I'd argue yes and no.  If the reasoning is "it's just more fair" then I take your point.  If the reasoning is "by distributing vaccine doses worldwide sooner, we can reduce the long-term likelihood of vaccine-resistant mutations by X, versus the Y effects of waning vaccine effectiveness" then I think we should start listening to the specifics regarding X and Y.

 

[IvanKaramazov]

I'd argue yes and no.  If the reasoning is "it's just more fair" then I take your point.  If the reasoning is "by distributing vaccine doses worldwide sooner, we can reduce the long-term likelihood of vaccine-resistant mutations by X, versus the Y effects of waning vaccine effectiveness" then I think we should start listening to the specifics regarding X and Y.

Yeah, I agree that that's a fundamentally different argument.  Basically, I'm saying that we should listen to the counsel of "experts" when they're commenting on matters involving technical expertise.  Knowing how likely it is for a new, dangerous variant to emerge under different vaccination regimes would qualify IMO.

 

[IvanKaramazov]

I should add that I do have some sympathy for Z's position, kind of.  I've argued a bunch of times that the US would be better off with a little bit less democracy and a little bit more rule-by-our-betters.  But issues that are entirely or mostly just flat-out value judgments really should be turned over to the democratic process if for no other reason than it can dramatically dial down the temperature if people feel like they had some kind of input into the decision, even if it was indirect (like voting for the president).  See, for example, abortion, which would probably have nothing even resembling its current level of political salience if individual states were allowed to do their own thing.

 

[parasaurolophus]

Yeah, I agree that that's a fundamentally different argument.  Basically, I'm saying that we should listen to the counsel of "experts" when they're commenting on matters involving technical expertise.  Knowing how likely it is for a new, dangerous variant to emerge under different vaccination regimes would qualify IMO.

How about when the experts recommend something that goes against their expert recommendations because they think it is more equitable?

Like for example acknowledging that a certain path would lead to more deaths overall and more deaths of every race, but that the percentage of of deaths would be more equitable.