Vaccines and Risk Misalignment

One of the biggest problems risk managers face in their work is selling a target risk treatment for correcting potential threats stakeholders may suffer from. Treating risk generally comes at a cost and stakeholders need to prioritise where best they expend their valuable resources so that they can maximise future potential outcomes.

In a logical world and a world without politics, it would seem obvious that we should focus risk control and treatment efforts on threats that are most ‘Risk Critical’ or pertinent.

What is generally understood by ‘Risk Critical’ among seasoned practitioners, is a measure of risk that is established by probabilistically analysing the frequency and magnitude of potential events.

In many cases this measure is explored using assessment methods that introduce model uncertainty into the analysis. However, when risk analysts develop models derived from epidemiological and empirically founded data sources, the risk measurements can have relatively unequivocal results.

So then, what holds the world back from making the most logical decisions to treat a risk, even in the presence of strong data and analysis?

Political Agendas and Economics?

Seth Berkley on Vaccine Development | TED Link

This TED speech may have you scratching your head for a moment on how governments prioritise correcting global threats or concisely; they generally don’t agenda these uncertainties until they are publically interpreted as a threat or only when it is economically viable to do so.