To the best of my knowledge there are four evil inaccurate but not-completely-moronic reasons for sticking with a 2-dose vaccination plan. Just to be clear: none of these arguments convincingly suggest that 2-dose will be a better method to combat the pandemic.
Many officials may be convinced that “no Proper Scientific Procedure has investigated this” is identical to “there is no knowledge”. In non-pandemic times, if you squint juuust right, this looks like a cost-benefit analysis of delaying medical research versus endorsing crackpot pharmaceutics. I find it more than plausible that many people (and certainly most bureaucracies) are not capable of adjusting this argument to a pandemic. In their defense, you have to be somewhat of an expert in the field to make the cost-benefit assessment on a case-by-case basis (even though it is obvious in this case).
Are there legal/reputational risks to publicly supporting 1-dose vaccines before the Medical Establishment has given it a seal of approval? This would explain why nobody blinked now that they are the norm—people were simply waiting for some agency to accept the blame if in hindsight it turned out to be a mistake.
80% is noticeably lower than 95%, so you can expect about 4 times as many thrillseekers to take the vaccine, go to the local mall, lick every object they can find and come down with something terrible. It could even be COVID. This is awful for public perception of the vaccine. Or, taking less of an extreme, people might risk-compensate to the point where 2x80% is not as much better than 1x95% as naive math might suggest (although I fail to see how it could ever close the gap. People aren’t compensating that much.… right?).
At certain points during the distribution it is conceivable that increasing the immunity in a particularly vulnerable subgroup of the population from 80% to 95% might have a higher impact (on the death toll, medical systems, you name it) than increasing the immunity of an arbitrary selected subgroup of the remainder of the population from 0% to 80%. This chance is bigger if you instituted some messed up prioritization on your subgroups in the first place (see: everywhere).
Anyway, the case for 1-dose is overwhelming. I just wanted to point out how otherwise intelligent people might get this question so incredibly wrong, seeing as I’ve run into shades of all four of these arguments in the past.
To the best of my knowledge there are four
evilinaccurate but not-completely-moronic reasons for sticking with a 2-dose vaccination plan. Just to be clear: none of these arguments convincingly suggest that 2-dose will be a better method to combat the pandemic.Many officials may be convinced that “no Proper Scientific Procedure has investigated this” is identical to “there is no knowledge”. In non-pandemic times, if you squint juuust right, this looks like a cost-benefit analysis of delaying medical research versus endorsing crackpot pharmaceutics. I find it more than plausible that many people (and certainly most bureaucracies) are not capable of adjusting this argument to a pandemic. In their defense, you have to be somewhat of an expert in the field to make the cost-benefit assessment on a case-by-case basis (even though it is obvious in this case).
Are there legal/reputational risks to publicly supporting 1-dose vaccines before the Medical Establishment has given it a seal of approval? This would explain why nobody blinked now that they are the norm—people were simply waiting for some agency to accept the blame if in hindsight it turned out to be a mistake.
80% is noticeably lower than 95%, so you can expect about 4 times as many thrillseekers to take the vaccine, go to the local mall, lick every object they can find and come down with something terrible. It could even be COVID. This is awful for public perception of the vaccine. Or, taking less of an extreme, people might risk-compensate to the point where 2x80% is not as much better than 1x95% as naive math might suggest (although I fail to see how it could ever close the gap. People aren’t compensating that much.… right?).
At certain points during the distribution it is conceivable that increasing the immunity in a particularly vulnerable subgroup of the population from 80% to 95% might have a higher impact (on the death toll, medical systems, you name it) than increasing the immunity of an arbitrary selected subgroup of the remainder of the population from 0% to 80%. This chance is bigger if you instituted some messed up prioritization on your subgroups in the first place (see: everywhere).
Anyway, the case for 1-dose is overwhelming. I just wanted to point out how otherwise intelligent people might get this question so incredibly wrong, seeing as I’ve run into shades of all four of these arguments in the past.