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Re:War Is a Racket (1935) by VagueMag on Thursday May 25, 2023 @05:09PM (#36076262)
Are the people who were saved by COVID vaccines never going to die from any other cause? I believe the $9M figure is actually just a reference to what the FAA considers a reasonable threshold for imposing a new expense on aircraft manufacturers and airlines in order to make flying safer?
Re:War Is a Racket (1935) by pfdietz on Thursday May 25, 2023 @05:15PM (#36076326)
So, saving a life has no value unless the person was already otherwise immortal?

Ridiculous.

Re:War Is a Racket (1935) by VagueMag on Thursday May 25, 2023 @05:25PM (#36076440)
No that isn't what I said, and yes it would be just as ridiculous as attributing the same value to preventing a 90 year old nursing home patient from dying of an endemic respiratory virus as we do to preventing deaths in plane crashes.
Re:War Is a Racket (1935) by pfdietz on Thursday May 25, 2023 @06:45PM (#36077389)
That's going to alter the number by less than an order of magnitude. The benefit still is massively larger than the cost.
Re:War Is a Racket (1935) by VagueMag on Thursday May 25, 2023 @07:07PM (#36077605)
Can you link me to a study which does a reasonable job of attempting to come up with a "Covid deaths prevented by vaccines number" while taking into account the effects of increased seroprevalence, decreased virulence of the virus itself, and the "no more dry tinder" effect?
Re:War Is a Racket (1935) by pfdietz on Thursday May 25, 2023 @07:30PM (#36077800)
The 20M figure was from an estimate in Lancet Infectious Diseases. It was for the first year, not the entire pandemic.

https://archive.ph/R5K3r

Re:War Is a Racket (1935) by hammock on Thursday May 25, 2023 @05:50PM (#36076716)
Typically the way it is done is by calculating how many years of healthy life you saved
Re:War Is a Racket (1935) by bee_rider on Thursday May 25, 2023 @06:06PM (#36076913)
Which would, of course, bring the “money saved by vaccines” number down a bit.

On the other hand, if we were able to factor in the benefit of milder cases and less long COVID/other side effects, I guess the number would go up a bit.

I suspect it is just too complicated for us to work out here.