Don't get dumb and/or careless now; How Pfizer Delivered a COVID Vaccine in Record Time; The Mass Distribution of COVID-19 Vaccines Is Under Way; Calling the Shots; Shot in the Dark; Why Are Rich People So Mean?

1) The first vaccines will be administered in the U.S. today – in record-breaking time – thanks to herculean efforts by a number of companies and countless dedicated workers.

All of their efforts will be for naught, however, if we get dumb and/or careless in what should be the final chapter of defeating this terrible scourge. In order to achieve success:

• Keep wearing your mask, maintaining social distancing, etc. for just a few more months until you and enough of your fellow citizens get vaccinated such that we achieve full herd immunity, and
• When you get to the front of the line to get vaccinated, get it. Don't go down the crazy anti-vaxxer rabbit hole!

2) I frequently criticize companies and business leaders for whom there is a special place in hell (for example, see my comments last week on Pornhub here and here), but today I want to highlight the opposite, starting with this Wall Street Journal article: How Pfizer Delivered a COVID Vaccine in Record Time: Crazy Deadlines, a Pushy CEO. Excerpt:

"What we're doing already is a miracle," said he told Mr. Bourla. "You're asking for too much."

Even for jaded pharmaceutical scientists, what happened next was little short of miraculous. U.S. health regulators Friday night authorized the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer (PFE) and its German partner BioNTech (BNTX). The shot is already in U.K. use and will be the first given in the U.S., capping the fastest vaccine development ever in the West.

How the drugmakers pulled off the feat, cutting the typical time from more than 10 years to under one, partly stems from their bet on the gene-based technology.

As the inside story shows, it was also the product of demanding leadership, which bordered on the unreasonable. From urging vaccine researchers to move fast to pressing the manufacturing staff to ramp up, Mr. Bourla pushed employees to go beyond even their own ambitious goals to meet COVID-19's challenge.

3) Here's a related WSJ article about the extraordinary logistical challenges associated with mass vaccinations: The Mass Distribution of COVID-19 Vaccines Is Under Way. 'Everything Has to Come Together.' Excerpt:

Trucks filled with COVID-19 vaccine vials pulled out of Pfizer's Kalamazoo, Mich., production plant on Sunday morning, part of one of the largest mass mobilizations since the country's factories were repurposed to help fight World War II.

The effort to vaccinate the nation relies on chemists, factory workers, truck drivers, pilots, data scientists, bureaucrats, pharmacists and health-care workers. It requires ultracold freezers, dry ice, needles, masks and swabs converging simultaneously at thousands of locations across the country.

To work, every one of the many and complicated links of the chain has to hold...

"Everything has to come together – the packaging, the dry ice, the vials, the material itself. It all has to come together to the same place and have enough of it and exactly the right people there ready to take it," said Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. "Right now, there's no conductor to the symphony," just many parts that each need to work.

4) The New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin addresses a provocative issue: Should companies require that employees and customers get a coronavirus vaccine? Calling the Shots. Excerpt:

Depending on the poll you read, 40% to 50% of Americans say they will not get a coronavirus vaccine when it first becomes available to them. In a survey of firefighters in New York City, who are essential workers at high risk of infection, 55% said they do not intend to take a vaccine if offered by their departments.

The possibility that large swaths of the population may refuse – or simply delay – getting vaccinated presents a perilous challenge to the health of the nation and the economy. Widespread coronavirus vaccinations are not only the best way to keep people from dying, they will also help revive business and the economy.

There is a way to get greater compliance: Businesses, which have spent the past several years championing their social responsibility, can require vaccination of employees and, in many cases, customers...

That's why business leaders are so uniquely positioned: They can tell employees that they may only return to the workplace if they get vaccinated...

Some companies could even require their customers to be vaccinated, which would have a bigger impact on the compliance rate and show genuine leadership. If, for example, an airline said that only passengers who were vaccinated could fly on its planes, it would instantly create the "safest" airline to fly. And it would make employees who interact with customers feel safer, too.

Can a company do that? The answer is: Yes.

5) Sadly, it seems that my willingness to wait near the back of the line to get vaccinated is rare among my fellow one-percenters, if this article is to be believed: Shot in the Dark: Will public shaming deter the 1% from cutting the line for the coronavirus vaccine? Excerpt:

"The entitled are more entitled. Jerks are bigger jerks, and the a**holes are bigger a**holes," one East Coast doctor, who asked to remain unnamed, told me. "People who are brave in the face of adversity make me feel good about life. But this is disgusting. The rich families keep calling, coming up with reasons, like I had a bad stress test once, or I've gained some weight. It's like we are going into war, and you see who the courageous people are"...

Doctors I interviewed disagreed over whether and when major health-care institutions or reputable health practitioners might compromise their integrity for their patients. Would a loaded donor come before a healthy childhood best friend? No one agreed on when, who, or how...

That East Coast doctor ranted about this. "Twenty times a day, every day, I get these calls from schmucks with a ton of dough. 'Who should I put the pressure on? My cardiologist or my pulmonologist? Which one has the greatest pull?'" he says. "It's going to be a feeding frenzy out there. This is happening before it comes. Wait until the vaccine is actually here. It's a total disgrace."

6) The idea of rich people elbowing their way to the head of the line to get vaccinated reminds me of this 2019 Wired article: Why Are Rich People So Mean? I hope I never have – nor ever will – fall prey to "Rich A**hole Syndrome"...

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Paul Piff monitored intersections with four-way stop signs and found that people in expensive cars were four times more likely to cut in front of other drivers, compared to folks in more modest vehicles. When the researchers posed as pedestrians waiting to cross a street, all the drivers in cheap cars respected their right of way, while those in expensive cars drove right on by 46.2% of the time, even when they'd made eye contact with the pedestrians waiting to cross.

Other studies by the same team showed that wealthier subjects were more likely to cheat at an array of tasks and games. For example, Keltner reported that wealthier subjects were far more likely to claim they'd won a computer game – even though the game was rigged so that winning was impossible.

Wealthy subjects were more likely to lie in negotiations and excuse unethical behavior at work, like lying to clients in order to make more money. When Keltner and Piff left a jar of candy in the entrance to their lab with a sign saying whatever was left over would be given to kids at a nearby school, they found that wealthier people stole more candy from the babies.

Researchers at the New York State Psychiatric Institute surveyed 43,000 people and found that the rich were far more likely to walk out of a store with merchandise they hadn't paid for than were poorer people...

A coalition of nonprofit organizations called the Independent Sector found that, on average, people with incomes below $25,000 per year typically gave away a little over 4% of their income, while those earning more than $150,000 donated only 2.7% (despite tax benefits the rich can get from charitable giving that are unavailable to someone making much less).

There is reason to believe that blindness to the suffering of others is a psychological adaptation to the discomfort caused by extreme wealth disparities. Michael W. Kraus and colleagues found that people of higher socio-economic status were actually less able to read emotions in other people's faces. It wasn't that they cared less what those faces were communicating; they were simply blind to the cues. And Keely Muscatell, a neuroscientist at UCLA, found that wealthy people's brains showed far less activity than the brains of poor people when they looked at photos of children with cancer.

One of my friends commented:

I live in the Bay Area and ride my bike and walk everywhere. It's always the most expensive, biggest, sleekest, somewhat customized Audis, Mercedes, BMWs, etc. who don't stop for me in the crosswalk, even when I'm with my toddler in a stroller or young daughter holding my hand, don't slow and/or move over when passing me on my bike, and would rather run into me or run me off the road on my runs than be so inconvenienced as to have to move their foot to tap the brakes and be five seconds later to wherever they're going.

Here's a related article by Michael Lewis, which he published in The New Republic in 2014: Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone – Especially the Wealthy.

Best regards,

Whitney