I am fortunate enough to have gotten my first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine.
This is an achievement not only in privilege, but also in the herculean efforts put in by scientists, public health officials, and the government in terms of funding and incentivizing the rapid development of vaccines.
We can see how incentivizing the development of things that are tricky to figure out works much better than the stance of “If you don’t do it, more bad things happen.”
It’s easy to do this when you have money and power – throw money at vaccine companies, you secure enough doses for your country’s population.
But how do we solve for incentivizing getting the vaccine distributed to the rest of the world? How do we solve for incentivizing people with understandable medical mistrust and distrust?
We know people respond better to sticks than carrots, so it’s important to do the work of figuring out how to incentivize leaders of the world to make it better.
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