Good.
In the coming weeks, Google will begin implementing a vaccine locator service on its platforms for Texans to use, including appointment details, clinic hours and more.
The rollout comes as part of a $150 million plan announced by Google in late January for vaccine education and accessibility. Included in this plan are vaccination site location services for Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as plans to open vaccination sites as needed.
“Searches for ‘vaccines near me’ have increased 5x since the beginning of the year and we want to make sure we’re providing locally relevant answers,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a release.
Information for the vaccination locator will be pulled from government agencies, pharmacies and VaccineFinder.org to provide users with detailed assistance.
The plan also includes grants distributed to public health agencies and organizations assisting marginalized individuals with vaccine access.
You can read the full release here. This does seem like the simplest answer to the problem, but it did need for there to be consistent data out there about where to find vaccines in the first place. Now you won’t have to know where to look for that, you can just search as you normally do. Or at least you will in the coming weeks. That should help a lot.
GRAND FALLACY – INDIVIDUAL GAMING AND JOKEYING VS. SYSTEMIC SCARCE-RESOURCE ALLOCATION APPROACH
Google can’t increase the supply of vaccine, which is *the* bottleneck now; it can at best stimulate demand, which is already way too high relative to supply.
This vaccination site locator map is likely to be useless or even counterproductive, except to the extent it is able to *deter* people from actually going to locations where vaccine is *not* available to them, so they won’t needlessly stand in line or otherwise waste capacity (such as parking lot space or occupancy in stores/buildings), not to mention exposure to infection risk due to congregation.
The message to the public should be: Be patient and wait until it’s your turn. We don’t have enough yet. Not even for the currently designated priority groups. In the meantime, the best way to protect yourself is to practice good hygiene, wear mask, and keep up the social distancing as best as is feasible.
Individuals shouldn’t be encouraged to devise ways to game the system under conditions of finite supply. And it’s irresponsible — detrimental to the public interests — for media and other public actors to drive up demand for vaccine even further by propagating the idea that *you* can have it too if you do this, when the stark reality is that not everyone can have it yet – indeed, far from it.
Some will be more clever and resourceful than others to play the game (such as seeking their shot contemporaneously at multiple distribution points), and inequity will be the inevitable result. Not to mention inefficiency when the same person becomes multiple vaccine-seeking persons in multiple venues (through contemporaneous waitlist/appointment registrations) to optimize their individual chances of getting the vaccine at any one of these venue, rather than getting in line in just one and waiting their turn.
That said, by creating a lot of hype, customer interest can of course be stimulated and drive up online engagement. And that is, of course, in line with the business model of internet businesses irrespective of how small the percentage of the community that can actually get the vaccine, given the current limits on supply.
Wolf:
“The message to the public should be: Be patient and wait until it’s your turn.”
Except that’s NOT the message to the public from the Biden regime. The message from the Biden regime is, “American citizens, wait your turn for illegal aliens to be vaccinated before you are.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/02/01/dhs-is-giving-illegal-immigrants-equal-access-to-wuhan-coronavirus-vaccines-n2584047
Equal access means every step of the way, people who do not belong in the US will boldly, without fear, get a freebie from our government while vulnerable US citizens are told to wait patiently for their turn.
I already miss the America First policy.
THE PUBLIC GOOD
Bill: For clarity, Lobo analyzes and argues mostly from the viewpoint of what is good public policy and is not a partisan hack. Lobo even occasionally agrees with some arguments you make when they are (or seem) valid, which is something not everyone here is willing to do, as you are aware.
I dare say your articulated opinion here is a really dumb one and here is why:
The virus is not a human being and will not under any circumstances alter its behavior to respect legal classifications, and the overarching public policy objective is to contain the virus which transmits irrespective of what a person’s legal status is. Physical proximity is a key driving factor (necessary condition for transmission, if you will), although it’s more complicated in the details (such as efficiency of transmission and replication of the virus in the body), which is why we need science for a better understanding of transmission and disease progression, and to devise/design effective remedies.
Equal access/nondiscrimination regardless of a person’s legal status here means that the same prioritization regime applies to the entire population in line with public health objectives. There is room to argue about who should receive priority under conditions of limited supply, of course, and that’s not solely a question of science and facts because it includes normative judgements and competition values. To that extent, I even disagree with Judge Hidalgo. You can’t JUST follow the science because science doesn’t give answers to normative questions. Scientific understanding is a necessary basis for making good public policy.
But to expressly exclude persons in the jurisdiction from preventative public health measures based on their current legal status makes no sense in light of the goal to be attained.
The public health objective is societal (community as a whole), not individual.
The public health objective can be achieved, with respect to illegal aliens, by deporting them back to where they belong. If they can show up for a vaccination, they can and should be deported. Let their own countries vaccinate them, since there seems to be a shortage of the vaccine at the moment.
Think about that. Deporting an illegal achieves the exact same functional outcome as giving them a vaccine; actually, it’s an even better outcome. The vaccine may be 95% effective in keeping someone virus free, and thus, 95% able to keep that vaccinated person from spreading the virus to others, but deporting someone is 100% effective, by removing the potential threat entirely from the population we’re trying to protect.
Bill’s Dystopian Wannsee Delusions
Suppressing momentarily all moral concerns for argument’s sake only, the mass deportation project would neither be practical nor feasible.
How would you go about rounding up and shipping 10+ million human units designated as illegal, whether to Mexico or Canada? There isn’t sufficient cattle-car rolling stock. Or do you propose using taxpayer dollars to repurpose idled private-sector airlift capacity to increase the share of native-born resident stock via a massive extraction program involving the foreign-born?
How do you propose the Government should outdo SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichman in the pursuant of the final solution if what you have defined as a problem, logistically speaking?
For further reading on estimating size of undocumented population in the US:
https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/how-many-undocumented-immigrants-are-in-the-united-states-and-who-are-they/