Vaccine Roundup - Marginal REVOLUTION

1. Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies….The vaccination hubs, which are run by FEMA and staffed in part by National Guard troops and other Pentagon personnel, have administered…about 67,000 shots a day, according to a series of internal FEMA briefing documents and data sets obtained by POLITICO….By comparison, the federal retail pharmacy program reported March 11 it had administered nearly 1 million doses over a single day.

Using the retail pharmacies is what Scott Duke Kominers and I argued for in mid-February in our piece titled, America’s Pharmacies Can Do a Lot More Vaccinations. Good to see the Biden administration is making adjustments. Nothing wrong with the clinics, by the way, only use the pharmacies more.

2. New CDC study of health care workers in the United States shows that the first dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine is 80% effective within two weeks. Big cuts in transmission as well. N.B. not an RCT.

3. One common criticism of delaying the second dose or of using the AstraZeneca vaccine or of making or not making other changes was that this would increase “vaccine hesitancy.” Frankly, in my view this was just an all-purpose rationalization for inaction. I thought that delaying the second dose could just as easily reduce vaccine hesitancy as increase it–not that I knew this would happen, I simply knew what would happen was uncertain. More generally, I thought that we should do the thing designed to save the most lives simpliciter, address vaccine hesitancy directly, and not try to do some complicated bank-shot based on ill-informed psychological speculation. Well Britain did everything that people were worried about–Britain delayed the second dose, used the AstraZeneca vaccine, used the AstraZeneca in the elderly and didn’t halt the use of the AZ vaccine and the result is the least vaccine hesitancy of 26 countries surveyed.