A lovely point from the always creative Tyler Cowen
Say, for the purposes of argument, that you had 20,000 vaccine doses to distribute. There are about 20,000 cities and towns in America. Would you send one dose to each location? That might sound fair, but such a distribution would limit the overall effect. Many of those 20,000 recipients would be safer, but your plan would not meaningfully reduce community transmission in any of those places, nor would it allow any public events to restart or schools to reopen.
Alternatively, say you chose one town or well-defined area and distributed all 20,000 doses there. Not only would you protect 20,000 people with the vaccine, but the surrounding area would be much safer, too. Children could go to school, for instance, knowing that most of the other people in the building had been vaccinated. Shopping and dining would boom as well.
All along our authorities have had trouble distinguishing public health from the treatment of individual patients. That's why testing has been such an unfulfilled promise. "Who gets it first" is treated like who should the government send money to. The point of vaccine is not mainly to protect individuals, it is to stop the spread of a disease.
from The Grumpy Economist https://ift.tt/3nVKvZf
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