Following the status quo path will likely result in significantly more people dying. It's a gamble either way, and if you want to argue that the risk of a first-doses-first approach is not worth the risk, then quantify your reasoning and explain exactly how many extra deaths you're willing to accept instead of these platitudes about paths.

You can't ask me to quantify my reasoning and then throw out wild unsubstantiated claims out like:

> Following the status quo path will likely result in significantly more people dying

Besides, the clinical trials _are_ quantified. The issue is we don't have data for the potential changes.

Armchair speculation of "maybe half will work" != data

No. But we can ask the FDA to justify its reasoning by sharing their modeling of the expected value of QALY for different courses of actions. It's ridiculous for them to spit out a proclamation like this without providing a framework for the decision other than "has not been tested".

I hear you about the path to end the pandemic, but there's also that scary thing about the virus mutating enough to render the current vaccines useless. That feels like a very compelling reason to at least consider whether a single dose or smaller doses might get more of us immunity more quickly.

Apparently the variant seen in South Africa recently is "concerning" scientists: https://globalnews.ca/news/7553824/coronavirus-variant-south...

Sure, Moderna and Pfizer could whip up a new vaccine to tackle this ... but how much does the new variant spread and further mutate while we're testing new vaccines?

News is generally trustworthy, but it is in their interest to always make everything sound as dramatic as possible. "Potential new strain which may result in mild reduction in vaccine effectiveness" is not a headline you will ever read. It's a very boring headline. It's in the interest of an advertisement supported company to make the most inflammatory headlines possible.

Let the science do it's work, don't try to be clever and cheat the system.