7 tweets · January 2021 · 17 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
musing about simpler distributed-intelligence covid vaccination strategies... ...take say 100 orgs that can administer • give each 1000 doses • top priority: use all of them • give each org a general focus area • let them figure out relevant criteria themselves
the general focus area at the moment would be things like: • long-term care homes • healthcare workers • frontline workers • people with comorbidities • elderly folk (the usual stuff people have been talking about)
because each org has the autonomy to decide its own criteria, fewer people will fall through the cracks, because they won't all be the same and the small orgs can move quickly to fill in gaps. and no vaccines wasted because the orgs are supposed to use all of them
the current USA* laws around prioritization are slowing things way down because orgs are trying to prioritize *not vaccinating people they aren't supposed to* instead of *vaccinating whoever seems best* (*Canada seems maybe half as bad)
these laws are based on a profound distrust and the impression that if not regulated people will do bad things. sure, some vaccines will go in the arms of friends and family, but that'll happen anyway and punishing people for getting caught does not help
I don't feel like this thread is super coherent, but the thing I'm trying to point at here is flipping the question from "how can we ensure doses are given out in the right order?" to "how can we empower the people with vaccine doses to give them out strategically?"
anyway, all of this thinking was inspired by reading this excellent report on how badly vaccinations are going in the USA, with incentives backwards and many ending up spoiling lesswrong.com/posts/i6doyTk6…