In many states the demand exceeds the supply. Everyone I know wants to get one but we're expecting it to be possible by summer at the earliest. There are even people flying to Florida and other places to get them. Why in the world would you need to pay anybody?
Let me rephrase the question. There's a vaccine shortage, how is there even an OPTION to have to pay people? The waitlist in many states is over three months for people over 65 or with specific conditions.
This is very much state-by-state, it definitely isn't true here. In fact "Essential Workers" aren't even carved out as their own group here, just general pop/everyone else.
In some places, it is still 70+. The original CDC guidelines put workers in firefighters, grocery store workers, postal workers, and other essential jobs in front of more elderly workers. Most states aren't strictly abiding by this guidance, but it does mean that these workers are eligible in some states.
In NJ you can be a smoker and automatically qualify.
Yes, we know that smoking increases dangers from Covid-19. There is, however, a self-induced aspect that makes it at least worth discussing as a valid policy.
And let me add that anyone can suddenly become a smoker right beforehand to qualify.
You can't deny it's at the very least awkward social policy.
at this point who really cares? the amount of doses given is like 35% of the inventory. we should give it to anyone who wants it before these lots expire
In particular, the current NYC vaccination phase includes all "public-facing" grocery store workers (but not restaurant workers!)
Not sure how that plays with stores like Dollar General, which carry some groceries. Don't believe there are any Dollar Generals in NYC, but what about the bodega workers?
It seems like February will have a bit of a vaccine supply drought. But Pfizer and Moderna are scaling up, and hopefully the Johnson & Johnson vaccine gets approval and gets past initial production hiccups.
So, maybe hope for March for jabs for “front-line” workers? Warehouse workers, bus drivers, cashiers…
hoping the Johnson and Johnson one gets approved quickly and can ramp up. 1 shot versus 2 is a serious win in terms of getting more people fully vaccinated.
I think this is a California policy. Other states are doing it differently. And even here in California, some counties are doing a better job then others in getting it out. I knew one person who had an appointment to get the vaccine in Los Angeles County, and then showed up to be told the wait time was 8 hours. Orange County seems to be doing a better job at the distribution.
I don't get the idea of requiring people to take vaccines. If people don't want to catch the thing, then they take the vaccine. However, taking the vaccine does little to prevent others catching the vaccine unless you go for a draconian 'everyone must vaccinate' measure. But then we are back to 'if you don't want the thing then vaccinate'. The logic doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Note: I am not an antivaxer. I think vaccines are great, and it is a good idea for people to take them, just like working out and eating healthy. I just don't understand the logic behind mandatory vaccinations to protect other people. It doesn't make sense to me when people believe others not taking a vaccine is somehow a significant threat to them.
And I am not saying the logic is incorrect, merely that I do not understand the logic.
Because businesses don't want to deal with the hassle of having outbreaks in their workforce causing business operations to halt, slow down, or fail? And don't want to be vulnerable to lawsuits claiming they spread the disease to their customers, or didn't adequately protect their employees safety?
For employers, I think it's mostly a matter of avoiding the lost employee-hours and corresponding lost revenue. For instance (though only an anecdote), a local Starbucks had to close for a few days as enough employees had symptoms to make appropriate staffing impossible.
Yes, that logic makes a bit more sense. However, if an employer can control an employee's personal decision to maximize their work hours, why stop at vaccines? Require everyone stop smoking, drinking, drug use, work out consistently, eat healthily, etc. Vaccines, even against covid-19, are the least likely to impact work hours.
I would imagine that if you look at the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic... we have a vaccine and we've been able to give first doses to maybe 5% of the U.S. right now.
It is estimated that herd immunity, or basically infection frequency / transmission dropping low enough that you are unlikely to get COVID-19 requires about 75% of everyone to be fully vaccinated (both doses for the two leading vaccines).
So to have the vaccine or not have the vaccine is not a binary choice for every person at this time. Lots of 64 year olds could walk into a grocery store, wishing they had a vaccine, but they don't. Ideally, every store employee at such a store is low or no risk for that 64 year old, just in case. Masks help but are not 100%. Catching it from surfaces is, I believe, presumed to be low on incidence, but I would not assume it is 0% either.
So the best bet for 64 year olds that are not yet eligible for the vaccine is that employees at places people have to go contain largely vaccinated employees as soon as possible. Also don't know the numbers, but there are probably a lot less grocery store workers than say all people between 50 and 64 years of age.
(I'm also not 100% clear on when a 64 year old with no underlying conditions and no front-line worker qualification will otherwise be eligible.)
>(I'm also not 100% clear on when a 64 year old with no underlying conditions and no front-line worker qualification will otherwise be eligible.)
It depends on the state. But in Massachusetts, that 64 year old is part of the general pool, i.e. they're eligible at the same time a healthy 20 year old is. It depends on how many people are willing to get vaccinated and whether vaccinations can be tamped up above 1 million per day (so 2 million jabs for the 2 dose vaccines). But it could easily be 6 months out, though hopefully closer to early summer.
Added: Though Biden is only promising to get 50 million people vaccinated in the next 100 days.
Besides the impact on business (from sick workers, contamination or even fines¹), herd immunity can be leveraged by vaccination. Nobody really want to talk anymore about herd immunity because of how to concept was used during the first wave earlier this year. Herd immunity is not a magic bullet and will not make those who decided not to be vaccinate immune. It is just with a higher threshold, you reduce the probability of infection inside the not immune population. The concept was distorted during the first believing on the self immuninity response to the virus and that the immunity will be a "once for all" scenario. The damage is done in the public view about how the concept is perceived and tossed away. However, the main logic about massive vaccination is mostly about herd immunity (and the hypothesises that the vaccine will have a lifetime/long enough action and no mutation of the virus will change it enough to render the vaccine useless).
So to answer,
> taking the vaccine does little to prevent others for catching the [virus]
Yes, with a high enough threshold, herd immunity will reduce the probability of others in your environment to get the virus. You can see it like a network effect where nodes that could be infected finish by being surrounded by nodes preventing infected nodes to reach high-risk ones modulo the hypotheses stipulated above.²
Besides that they are also social, economic, politic reasons to push to massive vaccination programs. But for me, herd immunity reasons are the why, I tend to be in favour of a nation-scale vaccination program.
¹ For example in the Netherlands if a worker is contaminated at his workplace, the company have to close their offices during two weeks and pay a fine.
IF you catch COVID non-vaccinated I'm fairly sure you remain sick and contagious for a far longer duration. In the case (like most) where you're asymptomatic, you are thus risking other people catch it more than you would be if you got vaccinated. That's enough justification in my mind.
Being vaccinated does not provide any guarantees. You may remember the headlines about "95% effective". What more is there to understand? If I am infected, I'm a risk to you, whether you're vaccinated or not.
You speak like the risks are the same. They aren't. Your statements don't talk about how the risk change with vaccination - and change even more when more folks are vaccinated.
If you are vaccinated, you are vastly less likely to get the infection you are vaccinated against. It is kind of like car accidents - you are vastly less likely to be in any sort of car accident if you are walking (vaccinated) than if you are driving a car (unvaccinated). Most folks will be protected.
Since most folks will be protected and won't get the disease, it means that - with enough vaccinations - the risk for those who don't get the vaccine or who are unlucky enough not to have full effectiveness are more protected as well. This situation is more akin to most folks taking public transport instead of driving cars: Since there are fewer cars on the roads, everyone's risk of getting into a car accident drops significantly.
Mandating safety is not new or draconian. We do this all the time with regulations and laws because people can't always be trusted to make decisions that aren't selfish. Vaccines fit into a category of things that seem to be personal decisions but negative impacts are communal. I'm all for personal freedoms, until yours damage mine. I know many immuno compromised people and the antivax crowd is their second biggest medical problem, after the diseases themselves. Vaccines aren't to protect you anywhere near as much as they are to protect us from you.
I'm 100% in favor of requiring vaccines and keeping the antivax crows in a silo, away from the general population. (That includes my family members who are antivax.)
>Mandating safety is not new or draconian. We do this all the time with regulations and laws because people can't always be trusted to make decisions that aren't selfish.
It's not as clear-cut like you make it out to be and there are real ethical questions here. So let's Steelman OP's argument. This vaccine was developed very quickly and there are potential side-effects. And like OP said, the vaccine doesn't necessarily prevent transmission (though in fairness, it must have some effect because it does reduce the viral load). So you're mandating a healthy individual (who may not even be in the at-risk group for COVID either) get inoculated with something that did not follow traditional healthcare protocols for vaccine development, can cause adverse reactions, and doesn't prevent spread.
Are we OK with signing off on that kind of policy without some debate? What complicates it for me is that dissenting opinions from credible virologist and epidemiologists and clinicians is routinely suppressed and blocked by social media right now.
>I'm 100% in favor of requiring vaccines and keeping the antivax crows in a silo, away from the general population.
I know you say that, but you're not because you're never going to fully trust health authorities with your health (remember, health authorities are people and they make mistakes, see what happened in Flint when the State was telling people water was safe to drink when it wasn't).
For example, let's say there are reports[1] of clusters of really major adverse reactions - do you fully trust health authority's guarantees that vaccine is perfectly safe? Are you really really sure this wouldn't be a repeat of the 1970s flue vaccine fiasco - another vaccine that was rushed into production? And again, the context here is also important. There is a higher risk factor associated with this specific vaccine than a traditionally developed one.
[1] Again, social media has decided to editorialize on this point. That is, even if credible reports come out against the vaccine, they will suppress these reports if it goes against health authority guidelines. Which, paradoxically, leads to reduced trust.
Are unvaccinated individuals the biggest, or even significant, threat to immuno compromised individuals? I think even the common cold is deadly for such unfortunate people.
The national government is providing the drug for free and thus no one is allowed to charge for it. The provider can bill for the administration of the vaccine. If a patient has insurance, the admin is billed to the insurance. If not, it's billed to a government program called HRSA. At my hospital I have been told that if any insurance company tries to pass on a portion of the administration as copay/coinsurance/deductible that we need to flag that payment to call the insurance company because they aren't allowed to do that.
Readit News
The irony is that this includes people with self-induced risks, like smoking.
I'm wondering how many people will either falsely claim to smoke, or even just start smoking to skip to the front of the line..
Why? Isn't part of the point to keep bodies out of ICU beds?
> I'm wondering how many people will either falsely claim to smoke, or even just start smoking to skip to the front of the line.
Probably some, but you're risking increased insurance premiums for years to come if you insurance company finds out.
Yes, we know that smoking increases dangers from Covid-19. There is, however, a self-induced aspect that makes it at least worth discussing as a valid policy.
And let me add that anyone can suddenly become a smoker right beforehand to qualify.
You can't deny it's at the very least awkward social policy.
Not sure how that plays with stores like Dollar General, which carry some groceries. Don't believe there are any Dollar Generals in NYC, but what about the bodega workers?
It seems like February will have a bit of a vaccine supply drought. But Pfizer and Moderna are scaling up, and hopefully the Johnson & Johnson vaccine gets approval and gets past initial production hiccups.
So, maybe hope for March for jabs for “front-line” workers? Warehouse workers, bus drivers, cashiers…
Deleted Comment
Note: I am not an antivaxer. I think vaccines are great, and it is a good idea for people to take them, just like working out and eating healthy. I just don't understand the logic behind mandatory vaccinations to protect other people. It doesn't make sense to me when people believe others not taking a vaccine is somehow a significant threat to them. And I am not saying the logic is incorrect, merely that I do not understand the logic.
I would imagine that if you look at the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic... we have a vaccine and we've been able to give first doses to maybe 5% of the U.S. right now.
It is estimated that herd immunity, or basically infection frequency / transmission dropping low enough that you are unlikely to get COVID-19 requires about 75% of everyone to be fully vaccinated (both doses for the two leading vaccines).
So to have the vaccine or not have the vaccine is not a binary choice for every person at this time. Lots of 64 year olds could walk into a grocery store, wishing they had a vaccine, but they don't. Ideally, every store employee at such a store is low or no risk for that 64 year old, just in case. Masks help but are not 100%. Catching it from surfaces is, I believe, presumed to be low on incidence, but I would not assume it is 0% either.
So the best bet for 64 year olds that are not yet eligible for the vaccine is that employees at places people have to go contain largely vaccinated employees as soon as possible. Also don't know the numbers, but there are probably a lot less grocery store workers than say all people between 50 and 64 years of age.
(I'm also not 100% clear on when a 64 year old with no underlying conditions and no front-line worker qualification will otherwise be eligible.)
It depends on the state. But in Massachusetts, that 64 year old is part of the general pool, i.e. they're eligible at the same time a healthy 20 year old is. It depends on how many people are willing to get vaccinated and whether vaccinations can be tamped up above 1 million per day (so 2 million jabs for the 2 dose vaccines). But it could easily be 6 months out, though hopefully closer to early summer.
Added: Though Biden is only promising to get 50 million people vaccinated in the next 100 days.
So to answer,
> taking the vaccine does little to prevent others for catching the [virus]
Yes, with a high enough threshold, herd immunity will reduce the probability of others in your environment to get the virus. You can see it like a network effect where nodes that could be infected finish by being surrounded by nodes preventing infected nodes to reach high-risk ones modulo the hypotheses stipulated above.²
Besides that they are also social, economic, politic reasons to push to massive vaccination programs. But for me, herd immunity reasons are the why, I tend to be in favour of a nation-scale vaccination program.
¹ For example in the Netherlands if a worker is contaminated at his workplace, the company have to close their offices during two weeks and pay a fine.
If you are vaccinated, you are vastly less likely to get the infection you are vaccinated against. It is kind of like car accidents - you are vastly less likely to be in any sort of car accident if you are walking (vaccinated) than if you are driving a car (unvaccinated). Most folks will be protected.
Since most folks will be protected and won't get the disease, it means that - with enough vaccinations - the risk for those who don't get the vaccine or who are unlucky enough not to have full effectiveness are more protected as well. This situation is more akin to most folks taking public transport instead of driving cars: Since there are fewer cars on the roads, everyone's risk of getting into a car accident drops significantly.
I'm 100% in favor of requiring vaccines and keeping the antivax crows in a silo, away from the general population. (That includes my family members who are antivax.)
It's not as clear-cut like you make it out to be and there are real ethical questions here. So let's Steelman OP's argument. This vaccine was developed very quickly and there are potential side-effects. And like OP said, the vaccine doesn't necessarily prevent transmission (though in fairness, it must have some effect because it does reduce the viral load). So you're mandating a healthy individual (who may not even be in the at-risk group for COVID either) get inoculated with something that did not follow traditional healthcare protocols for vaccine development, can cause adverse reactions, and doesn't prevent spread.
Are we OK with signing off on that kind of policy without some debate? What complicates it for me is that dissenting opinions from credible virologist and epidemiologists and clinicians is routinely suppressed and blocked by social media right now.
>I'm 100% in favor of requiring vaccines and keeping the antivax crows in a silo, away from the general population.
I know you say that, but you're not because you're never going to fully trust health authorities with your health (remember, health authorities are people and they make mistakes, see what happened in Flint when the State was telling people water was safe to drink when it wasn't).
For example, let's say there are reports[1] of clusters of really major adverse reactions - do you fully trust health authority's guarantees that vaccine is perfectly safe? Are you really really sure this wouldn't be a repeat of the 1970s flue vaccine fiasco - another vaccine that was rushed into production? And again, the context here is also important. There is a higher risk factor associated with this specific vaccine than a traditionally developed one.
[1] Again, social media has decided to editorialize on this point. That is, even if credible reports come out against the vaccine, they will suppress these reports if it goes against health authority guidelines. Which, paradoxically, leads to reduced trust.
Has anyone here paid for it? How does this work with insurance?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html
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