Go ahead, find an approach to morality that leads to a healthy 30yo getting vaccinated while a 70+ does not. I’ll wait.

The length to which people with no morals will go to convince themselves they are good never ceases to amaze me.

If the 30 yo works at a nursing home for the elderly while the 70 yo lives alone in a cabin in the woods

If the OC was working in a nursing home, we wouldn’t be having this conversation...

OC has nothing to do with the question you posed an I answered

> Go ahead, find an approach to morality that leads to a healthy 30yo getting vaccinated while a 70+ does not

If the 30 year old is employed in a position with many unavoidable close contacts, the expected number of lives, life-years, or QALYs saved by vaccinating them can be much higher than the 70 year old, if the latter has few unavoidable close contacts.

Why are we trying to maximize human lives saved as opposed to human life-years saved?

Generously assuming people live to 90, saving a 30yo who would have died of covid saves 60 life-years, while saving a 70yo saves 20 life-years, i.e. 3x more.

But the risk of dying is around 50x higher[1] for a 70yo compared to a 30y, which means you have to vaccinate ~15x as many 30yos as 70yos to save the same amount of life-years.

So vaccinating the elderly first both saves lives and more life-years.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

> Generously assuming people live to 90, saving a 30yo who would have died of covid saves 60 life-years, while saving a 70yo saves 20 life-years, i.e. 3x more.

This makes the fallacious assumption that if life expectance at age X is n years, life expectancy at age X+k is n-k years.

This is very much not true. See, e.g., https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Using actual life expectancy by age makes the number of life years saved at age 70 much closer to that at age 30.

Overall good point. Much closer but still significantly different. The life expectancy is 14 years vs 48

> The life expectancy is 14 years vs 48

...which is still a factor of ~3x, which means my napkin math wasn't too shabby, which means this tangent was completely irrelevant, because my main point is unchanged.

But you're giving equal weight to a year lived in the prime of someone's life vs. a year lived in a care home, which might not be a reasonable way to calculate it.

fair enough. "closer" but still significantly different is a support for your position.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. We're trying to avoid the deeper circles of internet hell on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is name calling against HM rules?

Only if they will save more lives by being vaccinated than if the 70 year old was. We should be focusing on people who are higher risk of being transmission vectors, such as grocery store employees etc, at the same time as vaccinating the weak.

Again if the OC was a frontline worker we wouldn’t be having this conversation.