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Absolutely. And that is a reasonable critique of the position. Especially if you pointed out significant parts of the poor health is behavioural! I'm not saying they are correct, I am saying its a reasonable non evil position to hold. With scarce resources some people are not going to be treated. But note that is also the basic decision we came to with age. Younger people had to wait to get vaccinated. So were we punishing young people for being too healthy? Or is it simply the pragmatic choice to try and equalize death rates between different age groups? We did deprive young people of care they would have got in an age blind society then presumably. Is that ok but race skewing isn't? Or are neither ok?
Like I said in the other thread its not just about race, its also age, and class and job role. Should you vaccinate a farmer or a barista? The farmer is likely to be more important to food security, but a barista is likely to be exposed to and expose many more people. Depending on your goals/priorities you can make a reasonable case for either.
Ah, apologies.
I personally think that the position’s semi-evilness comes from its reasonableness. It’s a perfectly reasonable chain of thought that ends up denying white people care because they aren’t yet dying in sufficient quantities.
Broadly I would say that the case of old versus young was so stark that it was ok to deprioritise them. And in general one is normally able to avoid such problems by having sufficient manufactured medicine.
But in general when things like this come up, I think that it is best to avoid temptation by not discriminating, to the extent possible.
Sure like I say, by the numbers they might be wrong. But presumably that means you accept the principle that if say 25yo black Americans were dying at the same rate as 85yo white people from Covid then it might have been reasonable at the outset to reserve vaccines for white people over 65 and black people over 25, befoe you start expanding it to white people 45 and so on. That if the difference was as stark as age turned out to be, that their argument would have been justified.
Which means i think its hard to call it evil. At least for me. But thats value not fact dependent, so certainly arguable.
Sort of. Broadly, I believe that young people weren’t in serious danger so depriving them of the vaccine for a while was fine. Rather, young people weren’t being deprived per se. Whereas your white guy over 45 was still in some need of a vaccine and depriving them is therefore a problem.
If the disparity was massive enough I imagine I’d bite that bullet and give the vaccines to the young black people first out of obvious necessity.
My understanding is that the disparities weren’t that wide and that in the cultural moment professionals were sort of overjoyed to find a reason to demonstrate their anti-racist credentials by giving black people preference in a matter of life and death. Which obviously affects my perception.
Sure, the disparities were not that wide (as far as I know). But do note the article is from before there was a vaccine at all, as they were discussing how it should be allocated when they had them, so reasonably early on.
Having said that if you actually read the paper and not the media phrasing even Dr Schmidts final recommendation was fairly anodyne. Prioritize healthcare workers and then essential workers who are likely to spread to multiple people (so a retail worker who has to come into contact with lots of people each day over say a farmer). In the end he didn't actually recommend that it be decided by race at all. Just worker type. He just talked about it being a factor to consider in his paper, which is the bit he was then asked to comment on for the article, or the article only published his quotes on that section perhaps.
The media version of X may not really represent X very well in actuality.
Fair, and thanks for laying that out.
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