Oh come on!
Deal with the reality of the situation and stop speaking in hypothetical terms.
There are doses being thrown away on a daily basis. It’s not up for debate.
A simple solution is to allow a certain amount of people to wait on standby to prevent dose waste.
And try telling anyone that has lost a loved one to Covid or someone battling Covid in the hospital that “it’s not the end of the world”.
If anything, I agree with you and the point I was making was that all this effort to try to target the vaccine to certain groups has its issues. It was a good idea for the first tier (health care workers and people in nursing homes, for example), but now it's too convoluted and not really serving its purpose. We may as well stop the charade and just open it up to everybody now. The highest-risk people should have been vaccinated by now (there are exceptions to this, of course), so we're instead in more of a herd immunity phase, so the more people we vaccinate, the better, regardless of the order we do it in.
I don't know the numbers on how many doses are being thrown away. We've administered 92 million shots now, which is 79.1% of the supply, so somewhere between 0% and 20.9% of the doses have been wasted. If it's more than 10% or even 5%, that's a big problem that needs to be addressed. If it's <1%, that's not great, but for an operation on this scale it's not unheard of.
There are lots of instances of people getting a dose on standby, but I don't know if most places are putting any effort into that. It seems like a fairly easy problem to address (each county could maintain a registry of interested people and randomly choose XX people each day to be put on standby).
And by "it's not the end of the world," I was comparing the two scenarios (hyper-tailored roll-out vs free-for-all), and my point was that in 10 weeks we should have hit our target either way. Somebody could spend a lot of time modeling the outcomes of the two approaches, but my guess would be that the effect on the number of deaths wouldn't be different enough between the two to be able to decisively say one approach is superior. I should've used a less charged phrase...