The correct alternative was absolutely to not apply such constraints, but that’s because supply should have been a non-issue. Paying $500/shot, for a course of vaccination begun in the first month, would have cost much less than 0.3 taken off of the 1.9 trillion dollar COVID relief bill of early 2021. This should have been literally free.
Zvi spends a lot of time talking about the problems of choosing scarcity—and dishonestly ignoring the evidence that African-Americans were more likely to die if they got infected—but the actual question should be why this wasn’t trivially solved in the run-up to January 20, 2021, aside from that spot of bother concerning the changeover.
The correct alternative was absolutely to not apply such constraints, but that’s because supply should have been a non-issue. Paying $500/shot, for a course of vaccination begun in the first month, would have cost much less than 0.3 taken off of the 1.9 trillion dollar COVID relief bill of early 2021. This should have been literally free.
Zvi spends a lot of time talking about the problems of choosing scarcity—and dishonestly ignoring the evidence that African-Americans were more likely to die if they got infected—but the actual question should be why this wasn’t trivially solved in the run-up to January 20, 2021, aside from that spot of bother concerning the changeover.