Agreed. When eligibility opened up, we drove 100 miles just to avoid potentially taking doses from people at risk in the metro area. Seemed like a good excuse to get out of the house for a road trip, as well as being the right thing to do.
We were able to schedule immediate appointments in an adjacent county populated by hardcore Trumpers. Upon arriving at the drive-through vaccination site, there was only one other car in the lot. No danger of cutting the line in that county.
We don't have full information about this story though. It may well be the case that the YC founder called out for lying about his qualifications for the vaccine was at a vaccination location where there were zero lines and poor community uptake of the vaccine. Idle doses sitting around doing nothing. At this point, the US has so many extra doses that it is shipping millions overseas. Depending on the location and timing of the founder who lied, he may be ethically doing a moral good by reducing his own potential to transmit the virus amidst a population of people who refuse to get inoculated anyway.
My point is only, it's sometimes dangerous to throw stones without asking questions or getting the full picture first. Taking doses when you aren't qualified for them is overall a bad thing I think we can all agree.
I live in Oakland. This incident seems to be back in early March. Back then the large vaccination sites were all listed on myturn.ca.gov (ie the Oakland Coliseum). They'd post new batches of appointments and they would be all booked really fast (within minutes or hours). But Curative was also running vaccinations sites in Oakland and Berkeley. They weren't listed on the myturn website, so people didn't know about them. They would post new appointments and they would be available for days, sometimes even available right up until the appointment time. This was during the time when you had to be 65+ or have a health condition. In my social circle there were many ineligible people sending links around for the Curative appointments. There was definitely a mentality of "there are so many open appointments, they're just going to go unused." Whether that was true or not I don't know, but there was definitely a reality that certain vaccine sites that were not integrated into the central database had tons of openings, while people who didn't know how to find the secret links were left to reload myturn.ca.gov constantly hoping to find appointments. It was also public knowledge that nobody ever checked that you qualified with a valid medical condition. So getting a vaccine appointment at that time for a totally healthy 25 year old was as simple as someone texting you a link and clicking a single checkbox to say you had a medical condition. In my small social circle, I know of that happening at least a few times.
The situation in Oakland was even more bizarre at the time. The state had generated certain “equity” access codes which would allow you to book non-public reserved appointments. The idea was that these codes could be used by members of otherwise hard to reach communities. Instead, they were shared by a bunch of local arts groups on Instagram. I’m sure they were abused. Witnessing that debacle made me lose a lot of faith in the prioritization as practiced at the time.
Alameda County wasted more doses than any other county in California, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a link between this fact and all the open appointments. It is true that if appointments were open, doses could go unused (and spoil because they were thawed in a batch).
If we continue using mRNA vaccines in the future, I hope some of these logistics issues can be solved. I'd rather the system prevents this, or allows it to occur in an unambiguous way that doesn't cause people to hate each other, question each others' morals, rat each other out, etc. I wouldn't say people skipping the line were doing the right thing, but I'm even less convinced that it was wrong. This was a gray area unaddressed by public health officials.
Hm. I'm not sure where the calculus lies on having a dose go slightly more slowly to populations that are more likely to get covid and/or die from it than quickly to young, affluent populations who are much less likely to die from it or get it.
I am sure that those decisions should be made by the state, not the individual 25-year old who decides that they are deserving of the vaccine now.
Also, many of those links that were floated around had equity codes embedded that were not supposed to be used by the general public, so would show appointments made available specifically for high-risk populations.
My general opinion is that people who skipped ahead in their 20s, especially in the Bay Area, were in the moral wrong.
The government, well in this case multiple levels of state/federal/city/tribal governments all made up their own decisions on what defined one as eligible for the vaccine, and then randomly changed them. The government should not be the arbiter of one’s morality.
It was a mess and IMO difficult to assign anyone in the moral right in the distribution of vaccines.
For example, looking at the vaccine distribution from a utilitarian perspective and not a political-agenda perspective it would have made sense to give the vaccine to healthcare workers first and then grocery workers next, as society in general will collapse if people are not able to get groceries. In a strictly calculative sense society doesn’t care if a few more old people in a nursing home die, but if grocery stores are closed there will be food riots/massive problems in a few days.
But politicians know that old people vote. So we had the age-tiered system.
IMO both if these perspectives were misguided and the optimal way to handle it would have been to had over vaccine logistics to Amazon who could actually make a web app that doesn’t crash to register for vaccines and just go first-come first-served.
Instead we had to try to register via Kroger (I think) who was using a chatbot to register people which was not very effective or high throughput. Costco had spaghetti code and had embedded way too much information in the page source, no idea who designed their signup page either.
This incompetence and unneeded beauracracy by the government literally cost lives.
> The government should not be the arbiter of one’s morality.
If people vote and decide that this is the way that it is being done, then people should respect that. Circumventing rationing because you feel like you are more deserving in that context is unethical.
> utilitarian perspective and not a political-agenda perspective it would have made sense to give the vaccine to healthcare workers first and then grocery workers next, as society in general will collapse if people are not able to get groceries
Not at all clear that this is the conclusion to reach. Grocery store workers are much more likely to spread, but are also very unlikely to be killed by it. Elderly people are likely to be killed by it. Most epidemiological modeling showed that vaccinating the elderly first and as quickly as possible was the fastest way to mitigate deaths, not vaccinating coronavirus.
This is exactly why it is better to come to these decisions as a society, not let individuals who may very well come to incorrect judgements about what the socially optimal thing to do is.
> IMO both if these perspectives were misguided and the optimal way to handle it would have been to had over vaccine logistics to Amazon who could actually make a web app that doesn’t crash to register for vaccines and just go first-come first-served.
This is classic HN backseat driver-ism. First-come first-served would have been ineffective, because again, there were ample reasons why vaccinating the elderly first made sense.
> Hm. I'm not sure where the calculus lies on having a dose go slightly more slowly to populations that are more likely to get covid and/or die from it than quickly to young, affluent populations who are much less likely to die from it or get it.
You went from two groups ("populations that are more likely to get covid and/or die from it than quickly to young") to one ("young, affluent populations who are much less likely to die from it or get it") whereas the latter group overlaps with the group who is more likely to get Covid. People who have work with human contact are more likely to get it, whereas people who live sheltered are not likely to get it, nor spread it (which overlaps with elder group).
Anyway, none of this warrants skipping the queue. The queue is there for a reason, and we could draw a parallel with responsible disclosure. Sharing a vulnerability with your co employees so they can exploit it as well is not responsible disclosure. However, the guy responded in this thread and I am not convinced based on that post that it is a vulnerability. It seemed to be just open for 18+.
The latter group "young, affluent" in the Bay Area, typically do not work jobs with extensive human contact. Most jobs with extensive human contact were prioritized in the Bay by March, so skipping ahead implies people whose jobs did not require human contact.
The only point I'm trying to make is that it was morally wrong to lie to skip ahead in the eligibility lines in March.
Ah right. I am not familiar with the Bay area in these regards. Makes sense though. For example here in The Netherlands, only the elder, disabled (certain disabilities), and the medical employees got ahead. Then the police wanted to get ahead of line, which is IMO justified (but I get that its fuel for people who are against vaccins or the Covid regulations in general). Btw, I edited my post while you replied to it, sorry. I added a parallel I see with responsible disclosure.
We should make those moral decisions as a society, not as individual apes who have incredible vested interest in tricking themselves into thinking that they are doing the world a solid by advancing their interest.
Your story doesn't sound that different from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27400221, tbh, other than the driving 100 miles and the Trumpian bits, which aren't relevant to the ethical question.
It seems to me that the important information would be: did anybody who was eligible fail to get vaccinated as a result of the extras dropping in? In your story the answer is no. In the other dude's story, it seems like we don't know. If his story is accurate then the answer is probably not because otherwise the people running the site would have told him "please don't do that because it might take doses away from the eligible". But who knows.
We were able to schedule immediate appointments in an adjacent county populated by hardcore Trumpers. Upon arriving at the drive-through vaccination site, there was only one other car in the lot. No danger of cutting the line in that county.