No human currently living has any experience actually organizing a vaccine rollout for a new virus and there is no empirical test case of prior examples we can study, so the reality is *there are no experts* on this. https://twitter.com/arindube/status/1340723087910842372

You cannot be an expert in something that has literally never been done before by anyone!

You can’t!

It’s like saying you’re an expert on alien linguistics or faster than light travel or nuclear second strikes.

What you are is well versed in other peoples’ theories of how these things might work, maybe, possibly, according to some theories, which have never been tested.

That kind of “expertise” is a very nice thing and it really is useful, but it is absolutely not the kind of authoritative knowledge which represents actual “expertise” which can be meaningfully distinguished from “educated guesswork.”

When a surgeon tells you how she’s going to open your heart for surgery because she’s done it to a hundred other people, that is expertise!

When a “public health official” says the best strategy is to vaccinate X group of people first, that’s literally just their opinion.

I’m chuckling over the whole “we have a risk algorithm” approach because y’all if we were good at identifying risk this whole pandemic would have gone differently!

So my view here is a bit different from either sides of the debate on age rating.

The debate about whether to prioritize the highest death risk people or the highest transmission risk is interesting but my view is nobody really knows which is better!

Which means nobody should be tossing out arguments about expertise or the obvious best balance.

Instead we should just frankly say we don’t know but we are gonna choose one and just go with it and see how it goes.

And then we have to admit things we know and things we don’t. We know the vaccine reduces odds of dying. We do NOT know if it reduces odds of transmission. So targeting transmission may not be wise.

Not because “we know it’s better to target mortality risk!” Because, we do NOT know that. But rather, it may be wiser to target mortality risk because “reduced death odds is the only effect we actually know for sure.”

That’s not “listen to the experts” that’s “make decisions in the full understanding that nobody, even the experts, actually knows very much.”