The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Covid Vaccine (with Vinay Prasad)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2024

⏱️ 88 minutes

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Summary

The Covid vaccine saved many lives but so many mistakes were made in how public health officials discussed it, implemented it, and assessed its effectiveness. Epidemiologist Vinay Prasad of the University of California, San Francisco talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about what went wrong, the costs of the mistakes that were made, and what we can do better the next time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is May 8th, 2024.
0:37.0	My guest is oncologist and professor of epidemiology
0:42.0	Vanai Prasad of the University of California,
0:45.0	San Francisco.
0:46.0	This is Vanai's fifth appearance on Econ Toc.
0:48.8	He was last year in August of 2023 talking about cancer screening.
0:54.0	Both of his 2023 appearances made the top 10 of your favorite episodes of last year.
0:59.0	But now I welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:01.0	Russ, thank you for having me and it's such a treat to hear that the listeners like those
1:04.9	episodes.
1:05.9	Yeah, they were awesome.
1:08.2	Our topic for today is the COVID vaccine and in particular recent paper of yours in the Monash Bioethical Review, co-written
1:16.0	with Allison Haslam that we will link to, title that paper is COVID-19 vaccines, history of the
1:22.0	pandemic's great scientific success and flawed policy
1:26.1	implementation. Before we dive in I want to observe that it remains surreal to me that the very issue of vaccines has somehow become a huge area of discussion, a lightning rod.
1:40.0	Much of it seems to be, if factory cherry-picked by lots of average people not
1:50.6	experts but some experts too and in somehow it's become a
1:56.8	such a big issue does this seem strange to you could you have imagined
2:00.3	this drama in advance of how it's played out, you know, if someone said to you, well, you know, it's going to be really controversial and people are going to lie and exaggerate and ignore key facts.
2:11.0	Is that strange to you?
	...

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