20. Who should get COVID vaccines first and why late is much better than never to act on climate change.
I think it’s fair to say we are all looking forward to getting a COVID vaccine, if we are lucky to discover one. I know there are some people who don’t believe in vaccines (and we should strive to engage in good discussions to encourage them to follow science!) but in general — one way or another we are all excited for this nightmare to be over. What we rarely think about is what should we do once we get a vaccine. Let’s imagine it is initially produced at 1,000,000 doses a week, and that 6.5 billion people would wish to be vaccinated. It would take us more than a hundred years to get it produced, not to mention distribution. Of course different organizations will hopefully pick production up and help increase these rates, but reality remains that the challenge of getting the world vaccinated ASAP is of unprecedented scale and complexity. And ethical questions of serious implications need to be answered: who should get it first and why?
An ethical framework for global vaccine allocation — easy read. Emanuel et al. outline ethical problems related to potential COVID-19 vaccine distribution and propose the Fair Priority Model to help address them. The text is thorough and educative, posing some questions that for me, a lay reader, did not occur to ask. What makes a distribution “fair?” The UN proposed one where countries get an amount proportionate to their population, but this entirely fails to address that some countries are in much more dire need of vaccine than others. The Fair Priority Model essentially aims to save time to live that disappears when people die and reduce welfare problems that follow. The goal is to estimate for each country: given a single vaccine, how many years that otherwise would be lost can we save? If young people are dying, they lose a lot of years that they could have lived. Rather than basing the computation on life expectancy, which would value lives in richer countries more, the proposed model used the global average life expectancy. This approach naturally gives more vaccines initially to countries where more people are dying, and the allocation can be based on frequent recomputations. In the second phase, the model focuses on economic and social consequences of lockdowns — how to help most lives that will be most affected by closed schools, lost incomes or dead relatives. Reading the text, it becomes quite clear how complex the ethical problems are, and yet the model seems to account for all of the important aspects of this huge endeavor. Of course, there is still plenty of responsibility on the countries themselves — they ultimately have to distribute the vaccines effectively (as well as agree to help the world in the first place, as opposed to what the US announced recently.) This is where my personal worry activates; I see there is a way, science can clear the path for us again. But will the leaders listen, or chose their party’s short term gain for the next election?
Hoping that we will get out of the grip of the current pandemic, I have to remind you, dear Reader, that one of the greatest threats to humanity still looms, unfortunately. Global warming is happening, and we spready know the consequences cannot be easily comprehended (see post #12 for some examples.) I wish I could confidently say it’s not too late to act, but that would be a lie — certain horrible weather events are only becoming more frequent because of humanity’s rather insane inability to take real action. However, as the second article for today shows, we might want to start working hard ASAP anyways, cause late is much, much better than never.
The human imperative of stabilizing global climate change at 1.5°C — medium-difficult read. Authors postulate that the climate shift caused by subsequent temperature increases from preindustrial levels gets more severe per every additional fraction of a degree we heat the planet more. What is more, they suggest this is due to the impact acceleration being a function of distance from some optimum for the system we live in. In other words, if heating earth by 1 degree was bad, heating it by another 0.5 is much worse than linear. They bring insightful comparisons to simpler ecosystems, like coral reefs that appear fine right up until a tipping point, after which they die within months — and hence illustrate that we cannot rely on interpolating progress till today to predict the future. And the authors did not stop there — they went through a solid cost estimation of implementing recommendations of the Paris Climate Agreement and compared them to costs of adapting to a warmer planet. The breakdown is as interesting as scary, as it points to many disasters that will become reality in the near future, yet it also brings urgency to act now to prevent even worse scenarios. It is a very, very good read, the forced me to stop and think quite often, but also taught me a lot. The article is paywalled, but luckily the full text and the professional review summary are available to read online thanks to Climate Analytics.
