You don't seems to understand how the fact that they do it for the wrong reasons change thee way you should modelise your problem : instead of the relatively homogenous unvaccinated population density you're considering, you should use "islands" of unvaccinated population that are in contact with each other whose connexity is the most important factor.
I agree that different types of communities should be vaccinated differently. A dense city will have a higher optimal rate of coverage than an Amish community.
That doesn't really matter all that much for the thread, though, because as of yet, we don't have enough data to get into those types of narrow specifics.
If you don't even have enough data to solve the problem with the toy homogenous model, making the model way more complicated is not going to solve anything. And certainly doesn't disprove my claim that we don't really know what we're doing.Also, another major issue I haven't brought up yet:
In the U.S. (and some other countries), pharmaceutical companies are not legally liable for anything their vaccines do (unlike ANY other drug). You cannot sue them, period.Given the uncertainty about whether we should be vaccinating more or less in the first place, this is one of the policies that needs to change as soon as possible. Companies have exactly one reason and one reason only to continue demanding this condition and lobbying for it (which they do): they already believe that they will get sued and lose in court from complications so often that it will outweigh the profits and they will go bankrupt.
This is, in effect, a private cost benefit analysis --- consider the fact that the people who know the most about the vaccine of anybody have already considered in dollar terms the benefit and demand for their drug, compared to the costs, and concluded that it could not be profitable unless they got a law that just arbitrarily protected them no questions asked.
I.e., the businesses have already decided that in most cases, their own cost benefit analyses failed.I'm sure that they are inferring things, and making estimates, not working from some sort of secret stash of data or anything. But basically, the corporate execs had the same conversation we are having now, and the end result was that "we can't stand by our product with confidence and we need special legal exclusive protection in order to make this drug at all" (it's not even due to R&D costs only! They continue to demand these terms to even DISTRIBUTE vaccines to new countries, even if already developed)