Because one of those things is contagious, impacting consumers and laborers and therefore halting commerce until addressed. It was determined to be more profitable to give away free shots. Yay capitalism.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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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?
OOP
Object Oriented Person
Ornery and Officious Periodontologist
Orange Octagonal "*P**olygon
OOP, yes
Unless of course OP's comment refers to multiple other comments, in which case it's OOPS
Fun fact: the Danish word for oops is "ups", which makes it fun to receive packages from United Parcel Service here 😁
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Unfortunately I don't think that it is standard, people also use OP to refer to a commenter higher up a single comment thread, so then the normal OP becomes the OOP, meaning the OP in the post would become the OOOP. Or we could use "Pre-Original-Original-Poster"...
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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.
Even worse, the £X is the short-term financial gains. Reducing poverty and homelessnes DOES profit over long run, but we don't have anyone at top competent enough to tradeoff it with "slightly less profit margins increased by next year."
That each human being has an estimated cash value is something that was taught in school when I went at least. It was more related to how much a death costs estimated based on how much value the person could have brought in if alive.
“If we spend more than £X on a given solution to this problem, it will stop being financially worthwhile”
Yup, it's like the old recall equation from Fight Club.
a * b * c = x
It doesn't matter how catastrophic the crashes are nor how many people, including kids, die as a result of them. The only thing that does matter is if the cost of a recall is cheaper than the estimated total cost of settlements.
What's really wild is that every government has multiple numbers depending on what they're spending on. The amount that their departments associated with it will spend to rescue a citizen held hostage is different from the amount they'll spend to save a life from disease which is different from the amount any particular infrastructure related department will spend to save a life, which may all be different from each other, and may be different based on cause of death (my government will spend a lot more to save a life from a passenger train related death than from a freight train related death or an automobile death)
ETA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_a_statistical_life
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I don't frequently have these kinds of debates in public, but the closest I've ever gotten to talking a vaccine skeptic out of their position was when I came from the angle of, "these shots are free because insurance companies know they work, and they would rather eat the cost of 100 vaccines than have to pay for every hundredth person to be hospitalized with the flu for 3 days, which costs THEM $40k."
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.
and it didn’t need to go through FDA approval, which like yeah it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s unsafe.
It was rushed, yes. And it didn't go through the regular FDA process.
It did, however, go through the full FDA process. What they did was run stages of the FDA approval process in parallel that normally needed to be done in series. All the same steps were done, but they were doing stage III testing at the same time they did Stage II testing.
And, funnily, the vaccine which actually caused health problems wasn't an MRNA, it was a traditionally developed vaccine (the J&J shot).
99% of the time the product is safe, and the FDA is just this giant ball of red tape you have to cut through.
Safe and effective are 2 different things that the FDA tests. Drugs aren't always safe and they aren't always effective. FDA testing forces pharmaceuticals to prove both things before giving their drugs to people.
It's a lot of red tape, but it's there because of things like Vioxx (an FDA failure and a result of "just trust us, it's safe") which ended up killing/injuring over 10000 people.
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the gov benefits from a healthy, non-pleage riddled populous.
the only reason America is different is because your culture idolizes money and a selfish level of individualism. thats why your health care system, much like other aspects of your economy and socity, is pay to win.
Yeah turns out healthy people work more and pay more taxes, which the government likes
COVID shots also save the lives of other people because of reducing disease transmission (fewer people sick means less transmission), which is acceptable for the most simpleton "What's in it for me crowd".
Meanwhile the socialized healthcare things are only acceptable for people who don't want to see others suffer (i.e. who have empathy) and/or who can see how living in a country were other people have better lives also improves their own lives (i.e. who have social awareness) and/or who are aware than "one day I might be the one there" (i.e. reasonable intelligent and risk aware).
So it absolutelly makes sense that in countries were people are heavilly brainwashed to have simpleton zero-sum-game selfish views on social issues, COVID shots are an easier idea to sell (and even then, as we saw mainly in the US, it's pretty easy to swindle the dumbest of the "What's in it for me" crowd to think the COVID shots are actually bad for them and refuse to take them).
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.
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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.
To think the years we've been set back. The things society could provide for the people... It really makes me sad.
Thank you, Michael J Caboose.
COVID shots weren't given away for free, the government paid corporations for it with public money.
Public trials for new therapies cost billions. Pfizer and Moderna got this stage for free.
Completely unrelated to this meme, but does anyone have the meme of republicans not understanding hypotheticals that goes like
"Imagine you are [x]"
"But I'm not [x]? I'm [y]"
There's also the fact that rich people buying insulin for themselves is enough to keep them safe. Rich people vaccinating only themselves though won't be anywhere near as effective.
Unvaccinated people just give a vaccine-resistant strain the chance to develop.
Clocks are circular because the repetitive nature of time with a mechanical convenience. Any philosophical connection is simply a matter of convenient circumstance.
Without judgment, I would point out that, and take this through what you will, the same could be said for literally every other religion. And, in my own opinion, with exactly exactly as much meaninglessness.
time is merely mans attempt to control his environment. clocks sole purpose is to create controllable sequences of events
Man discovers that the same government that doesn't pay for insulin or chemotherapy is willing to pay for COVID vaccine 🤔
man if seizures and hypoglycaemic episodes were contagious that medicine would be cheaper
Because covid is contagious. If one thing is worse than death, it's death that spreads, also know as a plague. Orders of magnitude worse. They change everyone's history, not just your family's.
is that also why the timestamps are conspicuously missing from this screenshot?
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