I observe that literally every country in the world chose not to do challenge trials in 2020, which could have sped up the vaccine rollout by around 8 months and prevented a great deal of the deaths in those countries. For hundreds of countries to all do the same thing here looks to me exceedingly like conformity (starting with some trend-setter, which I expect is the US). So I think that beliefs like this can quite easily explained by conformity.
Hundreds seems like the wrong sample size, more like around a dozen? Realistically, I would have thought that most countries probably don’t have the affordance to distribute vaccines much earlier.
Also worth noting that Russia did something pretty aggressive with respect to vaccine roll out which I think looks pretty good from a public heath perspective in retrospect. (I think they didn’t do full clinical trials prior to roll out.)
I observe that literally every country in the world chose not to do challenge trials in 2020, which could have sped up the vaccine rollout by around 8 months and prevented a great deal of the deaths in those countries. For hundreds of countries to all do the same thing here looks to me exceedingly like conformity (starting with some trend-setter, which I expect is the US). So I think that beliefs like this can quite easily explained by conformity.
Hundreds seems like the wrong sample size, more like around a dozen? Realistically, I would have thought that most countries probably don’t have the affordance to distribute vaccines much earlier.
Also worth noting that Russia did something pretty aggressive with respect to vaccine roll out which I think looks pretty good from a public heath perspective in retrospect. (I think they didn’t do full clinical trials prior to roll out.)