Time is a circle. That's why clocks are round.

Yes, herd immunity is inapplicable to diabetes, cancer, or allergies.

Edit: Is there a way to generically refer to not OP but the original original poster? The guy, for example, who’s confused in this post (Jum). Is OOP standard?

I think I was always dimly aware of the notion, but one of the things that covid really highlighted for me was that people in power are able to put an actual cash figure on every human life.

“If we spend more than £X on a given solution to this problem, it will stop being financially worthwhile”

And £X+ was the point at which disabled people, or younger people, or both, or whoever, were just left to die. Governments spent a lot of money, for sure, but not a penny more than was necessary to keep the economy (somewhat) upright and their cronies in cocktails and bigger yachts.

Yeah… Only

1. Covid significantly affected the elderly and those from poorer neighbourhoods. Net draws on government funds, not net producers of income. If the government were being callous capitalists they’d have let covid rip and saved themselves a packet in pension payouts and welfare.
2. The government were widely criticised at the time for not doing enough (too late with lockdown, too lax with mandates). The government cannot simultaneously find it prudent to not care about covid and care terribly that it is kept in check. Their callous calculation should have come out with either ‘save everyone’ or ‘let everyone die’. It can’t be both.
3. Pharmaceutical companies made a fortune, as did anyone with shares in them. No one ‘paid out’ there was no trade off of expense against predicted income. The taxpayer paid for the research, paid for the shots, and paid for the shutdowns. The corporations didn’t pay for anything at any time.

*Yay American capitalism.

Yeppp, insurance companies want you to have to have health insurance, be perfectly healthy as long as possible, and die or recover quickly when you get something expensive like cancer. Vaccines are basically always going to be a good value proposition for them because most people should get them which spreads the cost of R&D and manufacturing out between most people in a way that hospital stays and designer drugs can’tm

Then they start going on about how the vaccine was rushed into production, and it didn’t need to go through FDA approval, which like yeah it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s unsafe.

For the most part the FDA is a giant waste of time, yes they do prevent unsafe products from getting onto the market but 99% of the time the product is safe, and the FDA is just this giant ball of red tape you have to cut through.

Why would it matter to them whether they pay out for hospitalisation, or pay out for flu shots? The payouts don’t matter. We saw that with the banking crisis. They’re covered by bigger insurers who are covered by government bailouts because they’re too big to fail. All that matters is that premiums keep coming in.

Insurance companies can write off excess payments anyway. Those making the decisions undoubtedly have hedged portfolios, so if the company they’re working for goes under it doesn’t matter as long as other companies in their portfolio benefit. Many will even take out short positions on their own failing company and profit from its demise.

Gone are the days when CEOs actually cared if their particular company’s on-book expenditures matched its income.

Adding to your second paragraph, it also turns out that people who are healthy are more able to contribute to society, so even if you have zero empathy you’re going to want to provide for many of the basics that the US has increasingly striven to make unaffordable.

When smallpox was eradicated in the 1950s, it was achieved with something like 100 million doses of the vaccine, which was substantially less than the world population at the time (in the neighborhood of 2.5 billion). This is because scientists understood that the vaccine was not something for individual protection but was rather a weapon to protect the population as a whole (and annihilate the disease entirely) when coupled with a full understanding of how the disease spread.

Yeah turns out healthy people work more and pay more taxes, which the government likes

Public trials for new therapies cost billions. Pfizer and Moderna got this stage for free.

Or formless, in essence. Just a bunch of ones and zeroes trapped in an interchangeable housing.

oooooooaaaahhhmmM 🐄

The defense budget is entirely irrelevant to healthcare. We already spend multiple times the defense budget on Medicare and Medicaid, and another several times as much on health insurance premiums, copays, and coinsurance.

We could have universal healthcare without touching the defense budget at all, and it would still be cheaper than the system we currently have.

I’ll just say, the United States Marine Corps has passed two audits on a row, the only branch to pass an audit, period. And so it’s obviously possible, and the fact that others can’t do it needs to be investigated more thoroughly.

But cubes have eight corners XD

….no

So you’ve just given up on life? 😟

I was gonna say this, but you said it way better. The important part of vaccine mandates was the contagion aspect of it; so the funding was justified by public safety and obviously care for our neighbours was a huge incentive to get more protected.

Most Americans know it’s all just tax money, but most dont know that the amount of healthcare taxes Americans pay (for medicare/medicaid that only cover the elderly, disabled, and poor) is actually greater than most countries pay for their whole system that covers everyone.

Turns out you gain efficiency at scale, and preventative care is so much more affordable.

But even taking that point of view, asking “should everyone be given free covid jabs so that you are less likely to catch it from them and die” seems like it would be an obvious yes.

Sadly for Americans covid got caught up in the omni-struggle over there.