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Brett Paul Bellmore's avatar

"America chose to care about the appearance of favoring approved groups over disapproved groups,"

I'm kind of bothered by this phrasing. "America" didn't do squat. VaccinateCA is no less "America" than the FDA. Pulling back so far that you just see a country throws away a lot of important data.

What we were looking at was a bureaucracy problem, and mostly a government bureaucracy problem, not an "America" problem. The people who care more about 'equity' than net results are a fairly small minority in this country. The problem is that they're a very well placed small minority, because they put most of their work into becoming well placed, rather than getting things accomplished.

We need to remove them from those strategic places, and replace them with people who want to get things accomplished. That's perhaps the critical task of your generation.

I say your generation, because I'm in my 60's. I'm of the generation that got us into this mess, by concentrating so hard on getting stuff done that we paid no attention to who was using our inattention to worm their way into positions of power over whether stuff would be allowed to be done. We left you a real mess, and I apologize for that.

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Chris Hillcoat's avatar

The original post and yours are both very interesting. In the UK for once our nationalised system probably came out better with getting hold of vaccines and effectively distributing them. (Something else which shouldn't get memory holed is various EU leaders trying to stop contracts from being fulfilled to send doses to the UK.)

However I do recall that at the start, Pfizer vaccines were kept at -70 degrees, which was colder than usual cold-chain. It was only some weeks (months?) later that they found out it was OK at normal freezer temperatures.

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