So we don't know how beneficial your 2 above would be.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/941030?src=soc_tw_20111...

The results announced up to now just showed that the vaccines reduce chance of a vaccinated person becoming sick.

HN-ians like to model stuff, and i get that. To do it properly we need to know how many "young"(active ppl) there are, how many old with lung problems, the rates of propagation in and between those, and probably other stuff. But the goal is to keep the deaths down, and my opinion is that by far the smartest way is to first vaccinate the vulnerable people and those who deal with them directly (nurses, etc.). There's also a lot of points about practicality. For example; If i get infected not much happens (i'd just have to isolate myself, even with heavier symptoms). But if my mother gets those severe symptoms she would need to go to the hospital, if she would live at all.

Even if the math says it's better to vaccinate the young ones first, i'd still argue that it's overall safer to vaccinate the vulnerable ones first.

Where do I sign up?!

Or you could go by demographics. The hardest hit groups in the worst spreading areas. Etc.

You're right that it's not a trivial thing, but if you wanted to do it, reasonable approximations could be found.

If the goal is to slow down the pandemic, then the "irresponsible spreaders" should be vaccinated first.

On the other side, if the goal is to punish "irresponsible spreaders", then they should be vaccinated last. But that also means that pandemics would not be slowed down, and the ones taking that decision will be responsible for further spreading.

There's a good chance that situation will create a black market both for vaccines (real and fake) and forged proof of vaccination.

At first glance forgery seems like a very real threat considering how hard it is to tell vaccine from sodium chloride (entire testing procedures are based on this), but the same difficulty is also working against a black market: why pay if the seller can't give event the slightest indication that it's not a fake and the fake has no intrinsic value at all? You'd have to fake the distribution structures and not the product and an elaborate fake structure isn't something that suddenly pops up from some dark market investment, it could only evolve from simpler black market schemes. But those won't happen, at least not in time (except maybe in places with a truly corrupt regular distribution system, where it would start with "redistributed" real vaccine and then slowly shift over to fakes)

The UK government has ruled out having a vacination passport (for good reason in my opinion).

Strong opinions, loosely held.

The UK government changed their mind about a second lockdown given new evidence. The virus got much worse and they responded. What new evidence is there that the UK government is going to start vaccination passports? Has something changed?

That's the wrong question. The right one is "may something change in the future?" And an answer on this: "maybe, we don't know, nobody knows the future".

That being said, extrapolation of the exponential curve a month forward is one of relatively simple ways to predict the future. And yet, it was _completely_ unexpected for the UK government. Think about that.

I have no doubt there are some pretty interesting models being developed to determine the best course of action.

I believe that most experts are expecting it won't.