'scuse me?!
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Well, that much is true at least and it is a valid complaint. Plus, there is the issue of not being able to do TWO vaccines for the same illness and at the time there were at least 4 choices floating around. It really isn’t easy for politicians to actually decide and pick stuff. They are not used to taking very hard decisions nowadays since there is always someone else to blame for their actions.
As far as I am concerned we are not getting the vaccine where I live till May 2021, so by then we will know more, hopefully.
Governments will take that seriously only when the majority of people and the corporations do so.
That will happen when the first major port/seaside city (e.g. Venice in Europe, Miami in the States) starts actually losing real estate in a noticable way. Until then I do not expect anything to be done. It is after all a very common human behaviour to toss things to “another day” and procrastinate if all seems ok at the moment. I do that too with some of my obligations, so I cannot really blame them.
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Vaccination program is going splendidly here (not).
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It’s a trickier problem, since we’re not just dealing with a young person with covid and an old person with covid, but with young and old hospital patients. Regardless of age, once you’ve been admitted to a hospital your chances of dying are far higher than the average on the whole population, since you wouldn’t have been admitted if it weren’t that case.
So I’d definitely want the cure myself.
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It is a whole lot more complicated in practice with limited, realistic treatment options and patient/condition variations. In the real world, doctors have already been faced with the difficult decisions of how to triage and distribute limited resources to care for an overwhelming and varied population of patients. Some treatments will have varying chances of success and ability to improve outcomes depending on the specifics of the patients and their conditions, which greatly complicates the question of how to best distribute limited treatments and resources. Further, there are tricky and debatable questions of morals and ethics about how to prioritize maximizing the number of lives saved vs the number of quality-adjusted life years preserved.
In this hypothetical question, it’s imagining some sort of fantasy treatment that is 100% effective at curing everyone, so the hospital staff would probably prioritize the limited supply of such miracle treatments to those that they judge to be at the highest risk of dying, which would most likely be the older patients and those with specific risk factors.
However, this hypothetical question takes this a step further by framing it with a hypothetical “you”, who is assumed to be at a significantly lower risk of death (without this treatment) than some other patients that could instead receive this treatment. It is not really a question of medical appropriateness, since it’s difficult to imagine that the doctors would first offer this treatment to “you” when there are others that seem to need it more, or that it would be “your” choice to make. Rather, this is a hypothetical question of selflessness and charity, which depends on not just one’s own moral character, but also the specifics of the situation. What is one’s own prognosis without treatment vs that of the other? If one was told that they were maybe 50-50 for survival, and had the option to give up their treatment for another that only had a 40% survival rate, then I don’t think many would fault one for keeping the treatment for themselves. However, what if the doctors said that your prognosis was quite good and you had a very high chance for full recovery (without the special treatment), while some other patient had a very high chance of death (unless you gave up your treatment for them)? I think it’s a question that hinges on specifically what those odds might be (and also how uncertain one might be about such estimates).
This type of question can also be generalized and framed like a trolley problem, where the decision is an ethical question of how much personal risk one should assume in order to reduce the risk upon another.
To start with, let’s consider the baseline example where there is a runaway trolley about to cause grave injury (and likely death) to another person in its way, and the only way to prevent it is for you to choose to activate a switch that would divert that trolley onto an unoccupied line (which would cause no injury to anyone nor any property damage). In such a case, I think it should be obvious that one is morally compelled to intervene and divert that train, and willingly failing to do so (while fully understanding the situation and with no one else to do so) would be considered unethical and even deserve criminal punishment. Of course, all of these trolley problems make the simplifying assumption that there are no other feasible options (e.g., not enough time and/or means to simply warn the other person).
However, how might this change as one modifies the parameters of this question? What if activating the switch carried some risk of personal injury (say due to malfunctioning equipment)? What if you had to risk your own hand, or arm, or even life to manually hold the switch in the diverted position while the trolley dangerously passed? What if the other person did not face the risk of death, but only much less serious injury (say due to being inside of a parked car which would offer some sort of protection)? What if the choice was between sacrificing personal property to reduce the risk of injury/suffering of another? Should one switch the track to destroy one’s own car (or bicycle), while saving another person from most likely only minor injuries (due to them being protected in some fashion)? How much personal property should one be morally compelled to sacrifice in order to save a life or prevent intense suffering of another? What if the only burden was pressing a series of buttons on a keyboard, that would only modesty decrease one’s bank account with a negligible impact on one’s own standard of living, while potentially making a major difference to some needy people elsewhere in the world? Is it morally acceptable to not donate more to charity? Do our governments and societies act ethically in not doing more to reduce global human suffering?
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There’s also difference in how people treat hypothetical situations and those situations in practice. We tend to think (and actually are convinced) we would choose altruistically in certain situations where in the end most people would actually act selfishly or indifferent when the situation actually occurs.
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I think in those cases, like in transplants, they prioritize the patients with the highest probability of surviving, not dying.
Also, I would like to note how some prominent covid deniers/ party goers and whatnot that are even the slightest in positions of power tackle everyone else to get the vaccine (I see some of our idiot politicians doing it not even covertly enough, I guess they are not the only ones).
I can see them shouting “No masks! My rights!! Conspiracy!!!” and then keeping the cure for themselves.
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With transplants, I think one of the criteria is probability of survival after treatment and that’s also in relation to how dire the need is (i.e., vs probability of survival and quality of life without treatment).
In our hypothetical case, we’re imagining some sort of miracle cure that produces a 100% survival and full recovery after treatment regardless of the original condition. While this is highly unrealistic, in such a hypothetical model, the only distinguishing factor may be the risk before treatment, so choosing to treat those that need it the most (i.e., those with the highest risk of dying without treatment) would do the most to reduce the overall risk among the patients.
To be honest, I would probably behave quite selfishly in such a situation, and perhaps already do behave very selfishly in not giving more to charity and doing more to reduce human suffering.
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I think a realistic lesson that the current situation gave us is that bad things happen when people refuse to do the little things.
We have countless bona fide heroes in battle (medical professionals et al.) and what breaks the line? A piece of paper over our nose.
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I’ve read a few similar stories before, people who are old, people who have terminal cancer, people’s cases where the other side of the tunnel won’t be there and/or people who can compare terrible events to terrible events.
I don’t remember if we’ve shared similar perspectives, you’ll have to excuse me if we have, we’re at almost 1900 posts.
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I really liked your analysis and I want to add another axis to it. What if you do not like the person that the cure is going to go to, if you were to forego taking it.
A lot of people would forego a treatment, if it meant that it would go to a loved one.
A few people might forego a treatment, due to the very valid points you mentioned
and a lot of people would ignore the aforementioned points if another person they do not like (or deem as important as their own self) was to take the cure instead.
Considering that, it is a bit more understandable why most people practically wouldn’t do the altruistic thing. A lot of people have their altruism trained out of them, so in order for someone to really practically forego the cure, they would have to be giving it up for someone they really deem important and worth the potential sacrifice. There is a saying here that goes “noone is more ungrateful, than those that you were charitable towards” which sounds pretty harsh and counter-intuitive, but the longer you live, the longer you actually see it in action, so people eventually hesitate being charitable and altruistic.
At the end of the day, I think that this is an issue that noone can really be honest about it.
Even the most altruistic would pause and think “what about me?” and the most selfish would pause and think “what about that poor fellow in the next bed?”. Maybe they will do the same thing eventually, but they will consider both choices. There is no realistic “black and white” cool “good vs evil” answer, imho.
There is this amazing discussion in “Yes minister”, about that issue. I find it very interesting from both sides of the argument:
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Here they start closing cities. I fear for friends, especially the ones with precarious status.
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I am stil worried.
First, because if you read historical evidence, pandemics never just “go away”. There is no magical moment when diseases just ‘‘poof’’ out of existence, no matter what news outlets may claim.
Second, because when (when, not if 
) everything will be back to normal, I think that people will shake the good habits immediately (wash your hands, don’t cough in people’s faces, allow your employees to clean their hands during shifts/have access to trashcans etc, stop spitting on children “to prevent the evil eye”, dust and clean your products in your shop a little more regularly are just some examples of rules that are not respected). Therefore, the Next Day will be dangerous for people who can’t protect themselves socially and financially.
Third (because it is self-evident), sick people will not stop needing support. They will still need treatment, monitoring and protection from mutations/side-effects.
Now that we have some vaccines available, every effort/initiative that is not personal effort/initiative I am afraid that it will cease. Each one of us will have to rely on other individuals. I want to be optimistic, but yes, I am worried now more than in the beginning.
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Well, this explains some things.
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“low-rent Hamlet” LOL
NSFW, btw
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The county’s directive also advised ambulance crews to not transport patients who have a limited chance of survival
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According to a person close to the vaccines we received, the vaccines have no direction sheet (I don’t know the term, the piece of paper that states the detailed info about the drug). Which is the first time they’ve seen this happen, and it’s against the law. Even if not in Greek (in some rare cases, usually it’s in Greek), every single drug in Greece is accompanied by that paper.
Now, that person is no conspiracy nut, but they told me this fact gave them pause about getting the vaccine for now, since procedures are wrong.
In any case I’m not getting vaccinated any time soon by official decree, because other people are scheduled first, but I do wonder if it’s the usual Greeks being useless with proper procedures or if there is a problem with the batch we received. I’d want to know if other EU countries got that paper.
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I am dusting off my storage and I found this in my “old debates” folder. I had underlined those parts for a different topic, but the whole page is worth reading. It is from Carl Sagan’s “The demon haunted world” (1997):
Which begs the question, what are they going to do now anyway? They recently surpassed 4000 dead per day 
What measures can they take in a population that is not only fatigued by this year-long issue, but never really followed any cohesive and, more importantly, widely-affecting rules and regulations?
What measures can they understand, what measures can they accept and what measures can they follow? Those are not obvious things at this point.
Even if our country’s measures (Greece) were akin to a drunken man trying to find his front door key in the dark, at least there were some country-wide measures which the populace (even most conspiracy theorists) mostly followed. The result is not really good, we all tired of this governmental fiasco, but at least something has been done (yeah the bar is that low now).
A lot of people here said “hey, our town doesn’t have covid cases, how come the government shut us down too?” … obviously because people would flock into places that are open, when most of the country is on lockdown. Despite the lockdown, even in my village some people arrived from Athens claiming that they are visiting the countryside to “tend to their fields” 
Imagine how many more would have arrived if we were not on lockdown as well.
Now, that is something that can be moderately enforced in a small country like Greece where you cannot really move around prefectures without being found (the whole country has 2 main highways). You cannot do that in the States. Not only they are vast in size, but you cannot close all of them, all the counties and guard the roads and impose fines. So, if you close one state, people will gravitate towards the other states, creating a vicious cicle of open-close-open-close.
I am really worried that in the States they are way past on things that can practically be done.
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To enforce here they use local structures (community) so each village in a closed area will put check up even on smallest roads.
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