(As of ~4/1, I’ve seen a much higher anecdotal success rate w/ strategies like this)
billz
Karma: 261
Early career people should consider joining fast-growing startups in emerging technologies
In hindsight, I would’ve liked to spend more time editing my original post (I was trying to get it out quickly). I think the framing I would use in hindsight is:
I’m hugely in favor of young healthy people finding vaccines that are either 1) going to be thrown out, 2) at a place w/ extra time slots that wouldn’t go to someone else, but 3) from the evidence I’ve seen, it seems like 1⁄2 aren’t options right now, and so 4) trying to find a way to get a vaccine right now seems likely to be taking directly away from someone else who is higher risk. There are still other ways to justify this (e.g. catherio’s comment about ethical offsetting), but because I’ve heard a bunch of rumors along the lines of “1/2 are options right now,” I wanted to share that the evidence I’ve seen suggests that’s largely false. It’s probably also not a big deal if someone gets a vaccine early, as it seems likely people will be able to seek them out within the next ~month.
I agree that slow rollout is more of a problem than poor prioritization. But at least in the Bay Area, I think trying to get a vaccine as a young healthy person right now is in expectation directly taking away a vaccine from a more at-risk person for x weeks, and haven’t seen significant evidence against that yet. As soon as there is the ability to e.g. drive somewhere to get vaccinated where the time slot would have otherwise gone to waste, I’m strongly in favor of doing that.
Agreed that driving somewhere seems like a good option—that’s what I was trying to allude to with my comments like “there appear to be some mass vaccination events that people are likely to be able to access in the next month.” That being said, I know of many people who’ve tried to do exactly that and have not found available appointments. I mentioned in the comments below that the website linked there for instance didn’t have any options within ~1hr of the bay, although I found one 3.5 hours away.
Ya that seems like a decent approach for people that want to get one early. To be clear, I know of people who are making the arguments I said above to justify getting one early (and who have no plans to offset), and I think there are other arguments to justify getting it early, but I don’t think “there are many opening available in the bay” is backed up by evidence from what I can tell.
Hmm actually on second-look, that site doesn’t seem to show any available slots for the vaccine, but does show some for pcr tests? Perhaps more will open up soon.
[addition: I found one site 3.5 hours away from Berkeley on that site that does appear to have openings today, https://curative.com/sites/26207#9/36.1656/-119.3247 but didn’t find any vaccine openings for the places in the bay]
[Edit: the link appears to be misleading, see my follow-up question below]
That does seem quite compelling, thanks for sharing. I think I’ll check again in a couple days as it sounds like CA is opening up slots to 4.4M more people tomorrow. Perhaps there is an effect where right at the start of a new section of people, there are some extra slots?
Also, if you don’t feel comfortable making a public counterargument but do in a private message, I’d still be interested to hear it
We’re a nonprofit. We don’t have plans to make profits, and it seems less likely than e.g. OpenAI that in the future we would go nonprofit --> tandem for-profit / nonprofit, but there are a variety of revenue-generating things I can imagine us doing (e.g. consulting with industry labs to help them align their models).