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Vaccine Greed

Dan Crawford | August 23, 2021 12:24 pm

Healthcare

Politics

Evonomic’s contributor Jag Bhalla offers his narrative of how the vaccine choices played out in the US and looks to continue along the same lines with the booster shots for Covid 19 in Vaccine Greed: Capitalism Without Competition Isn’t Capitalism, It’s Exploitation.

DID GREED JUST save the day? That’s what British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed recently. “The reason we have the vaccine success,” he said in a private call to Conservative members of Parliament, “is because of capitalism, because of greed.”

Despite later backpedaling, Johnson’s remark reflects a widely influential but wildly incoherent view of innovation: that greed — the unfettered pursuit of profit above all else — is a necessary driver of technological progress. Call it the need-greed theory.

2 Comments

Fred C. Dobbs says:

August 24, 2021 at 8:08 am

Vaguely related.

Many Older Americans Still Aren’t Vaccinated, Making the Delta Wave Deadlier

Compared with other highly vaccinated countries, large parts of the United States have many vulnerable seniors, helping spur hospitalization and death.

The United States has a far higher share of seniors without full vaccine protection than many other wealthy countries, a key risk factor driving serious Covid-19 illness and death, a Times analysis shows.

As the Delta variant has torn across the country, America’s pace of vaccinations has sped up after months of relative stagnation, and full federal approval of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday could extend that momentum. Just over half of Americans are now fully vaccinated.

But national averages mask the high rate of older Americans who remain deeply vulnerable. Older people still account for most Covid-19 deaths, and in many counties, especially in the South and Mountain West, seniors without full vaccination make up more than 10 percent of the total population. …

(Graphics at the link.)
- Fred C. Dobbs says:
  
  August 24, 2021 at 8:10 am
  
  … While older Americans are more likely to be vaccinated than younger Americans, seniors without full vaccine protection are at much higher risk of dying from Covid-19.
  
  The Delta variant has hit many areas with clusters of vulnerable seniors particularly hard. Low elderly vaccination rates in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana and Nevada have coincided with surging rates of hospitalization and death.
  
  Comparisons between countries are inexact, and no single factor determines how many people get seriously sick or die during a Covid-19 outbreak. Overall vaccination coverage in a community, as well as existing health conditions, access to medical care and individual behavior like mask wearing all play large roles.
  
  Some areas at high risk in the United States have not yet experienced severe Delta outbreaks, including parts of Colorado, Kansas and North Dakota. …