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Europe's Vaccine Disaster

208 points by danielfoster 6y ago

Uhhrrr 6y ago
Archive: https://archive.is/D8X6u https://archive.is/D8X6u
munk-a 6y ago
This highlights one issue I've had with calls to secure more vaccine in the US and elsewhere. Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production - everyone has been making purchasing agreements and everyone knows that everybody is going to need it. These pushes to outbid other countries might go toward funding additional capacity for the next pandemic, but these corporations didn't have enough warning to know that they were the ones that'd need to make this investment so, for the moment, all of these countries securing additional doses are securing them out of the pockets of other countries.
- plandis 6y ago
  > Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production I was under the assumption that Project Warp Speed explicitly directed funding from the US government to help ramp up production while vaccines were still being tested. Did that not happen?
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    It did happen. But mRNA vaccines are new. The capacity needed to be built all along the supply chain. Months isn't a lot of time when you're talking about building new brick and mortar procduction infrastructure.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    It did, it just wasn't ambitious enough. There were separate grants, but the preorders were only enough to cover the entire population if multiple vaccines were approved. I guess it is possible that production was scaled up as fast as possible, but it seems that there was a lack of imagination in the planning process (setting low goals, not anticipating far enough ahead, etc).
    - Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
      From the now taken down Operation Warp Speed page, see here https://web.archive.org/web/20210119000857/https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/explaining-operation-warp-speed/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210119000857/https://www.hhs.g... 300 million doses from AZ, 100 million from Novavax, as mentioned in my other comment 100 million from Pfizer, 100 million from Sanofi/GSK which as mentioned failed, and a 100 million from Johnson and Johnson. Also mentions we signed the second 100 million dose contract with Moderna December 11th, that would be based their results which led to their submitting their application for an FDA Emergency Use Authorization on November 30th. See also lots of details on supply chain spending, well over a billion dollars. So while you're technically correct, with how much effort it takes to ramp up production, see how Johnson and Johnson isn't going to meet their early 12 million dose promise, I don't see our general approach as being wrong. Signing multiple 700 million dose contracts would not in any way speed production, that only happens when you get an initial contract and start making it. Which is exactly what Moderna and Pfizer did, quite some time before getting EUAs, lots of doses were shipped within days. Where I live, for Pfizer the Monday after the FDA's Friday issuance of an EUA. To a hospital which had rented an ultra-cold freezer to store it, a lot of work and money has gone into this hole process.
      - maxerickson 6y ago
        Yeah, like $12 billion dollars. We are spending trillions on relief, so it's worth asking if more money spent on production could have accelerated things. A few tens of billions more would have been cheap! The vaccine shipments here (Michigan) have accelerated considerably since December, implying a pretty small head start on manufacturing. The distribution trends tab on https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98178_103214_103272-547150--,00.html https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98178_1032... shows the shipments.
jacquesm 6y ago
It's not just a vaccine disaster, it is a COVID disaster. The response to COVID in most of the developed world was a completely fuck up. We are still learning lessons that should have been learned a year ago, and there are still people everywhere - here too - that believe the best way to tackle a crisis of this magnitude is to stick your head in the sand and to pretend it isn't happening. I've definitely lost the illusion that mankind is able to rise to the challenge as a whole species, in spite of our smarts and our ability to communicate. Some of us will, and some of us won't, the winners will be the ones that adapt rapidly.
- d1zzy 6y ago
  I think humanity (as a species) is able to overcome situations like this, but not without large loss of life (and potentially setback in culture, technology, society). So I wouldn't be too concerned about humanity, just about our current civilization.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    Yes humanity has suffered and survived far worse than COVID-19, even if you imagine that nothing at all had been done to mitigte it.
- trianglem 6y ago
  We all intrinsically knew what to expect from and how to react to a pandemic. I honestly believe intentional misinformation from the Trump administration caused the massive bifurcation in dealing with this problem with a united front. Asian countries did not have this problem, and look at how much better they are faring.
  - sn41 6y ago
    That was due to the lessons from SARS-Cov1 in 2003. Asian countries that did not suffer from SARS-Cov1 did very badly with covid-19. e.g. India. In India the misinformation was uniquely Indian - first they said that vegetarians will not get Covid, it came from bushmeat (ignoring the fact that human-to-human transmission was through cough droplets), then they said that Yoga fights Covid, then they blamed it on a minority gathering (ignoring the fact that people were streaming in unchecked through international airports through all of January and February 2020). One of the lessons taught in "crisis management", it seems, is to downplay an emergency so that the people do not panic. Death due to ignorance is much preferable?
outoftheabyss 6y ago
It’s been a strange week. We’ve seen left and right unite against Wall Street and Dublin, Belfast and London unite against Brussels.
- duncans 6y ago
  More Dublin than Belfast?
  - outoftheabyss 6y ago
    All parties up north responded in the same way to Dublin?
cdavid 6y ago
I wonder if this will become a watershed moment for the EU. I've always been an ardent believer in the European program, both for historical reasons (I have French and German grand parents), but also because for all its warts, I believed the EU had a competent bureaucracy, able to go above the pettyness of national politics. French politicians of all side love scapegoating EU for their own failures. To say that the current situation shattered that conviction would be an understatement. I have no admiration for the Trump administration, but they objectively did almost everything better. It is also amusing and tragic to see all the core countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, etc.) all doing badly. They cannot frame this as a "cultural" or national failure of specific country like in 2011 at the peak of "Greek" crisis. And 2021 may well be worse than 2020 in number of life affected as populations are tired of various movement constraints, new virus strains coming up, etc. [edit] my comment comparing US vs the EU was about vaccines, not about the COVID handling in general. For the latter, comparing policies and impact is much harder. [edit 2] On #deaths, most countries in the EU and Europe in general did not do that much better than the US: France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands all have around ~0.08 - 0.12 % of their population that died from the disease (quite worse for Belgium). And Germany will likely reach that range as well.
- trianglem 6y ago
  The Trump administration spewed misinformation from day one that caused massive dissonance in dealing with the problem. Saying they did better when they had literally no plan and let 400,000 people die is incredible dissembling and most likely a political statement than a logical one. They literally dissuaded people from using masks.
  - mikem170 6y ago
    A lot of people in our democracy might not agree with your assessment of this pandemic. A lot of people feel that 1 in 750 people dying, mostly older with comorbidities, is not the disaster for society that some seem to think it is. A lot of people think that giving up a year or two of their social and economic lives is not worth trying to avoid a 1 in 750, or 0.13%, chance of dying. Especially those, like the young, who have less than 1 in 100,000 chance of dying. Trying to tell them this is a catastrophe based on the numbers isn't going to work.
robotmay 6y ago
From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Which was a pretty big surprise to both the ROI and the UK. The first not being consulted on the decision, and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca. They've now backed out of this decision: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on-vaccine-exports-to-northern-ireland-trigger-diplomatic-row https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on... Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program, the EC/EU has made themselves look like total amateurs by whining about it in public and trying to shift the blame and conflating the UK & AstraZeneca. I think they really need to sit a bunch of the big names down together and actually plan their public strategy; Macron's been out today going in a completely different direction but somehow also circling back to blame the UK and simultaneously claiming (falsely) that the Oxford vaccine has a less than 10% success rate in over 65s, which probably isn't going to boost vaccine adoption: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macron-coronavirus-vaccine-exports-eu-controlled https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macro... It has been an...odd day, as someone who is a very pro-EU, remain-voting, UK citizen. God knows we deserve plenty of blame as a nation but I don't really feel like it's altogether deserved this time.
- Hunisgung 6y ago
  I know people at the European Medecines Agency that were angry at Ursula von der Leyen in December because she was always making public announcements (about the beginning and speed of the vaccination campaign) with no regard for the reality of regulatory activities or manufacturing and logistics constraints.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  I'm also pro-EU,remainer,etc. The problem is that the EU is the political graveyard, because countries send the most absurd people there. Not all of them,of course,but a lot. EU works when things are going slow and because of the sheer economical scale and power, everybody takes it serious when it comes to negotiations. But the EC isn't a bunch of experts on rapid situations. It's exactly the same when a French civil servant complained that they are being outbid when buying masks, because the state can't pay upfront, while the Americans ( individuals) could,so essentially a 60 million people country ended up competing against a few individuals with cash. Same with vaccines: while the EK were trying to come up with something, Israelis already were calling around the globe to make sure they get it first.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> The EU negotiating team, according to people familiar with the talks, was intent on pushing down the price. In the middle of a pandemic that is literally costing trillions, this seems like the EU negotiators lost sight of the big picture.
- robotmay 6y ago
  I was under the assumption that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was being produced at cost under the agreement with Oxford University. I'm curious as to what cost savings they were after - possibly on distribution or in establishing the manufacturing bases?
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    It is, but there are still regional price differences due to labor, manufacturing and supply chain costs. However trying to get a $3 vaccine down to $2 is laughable for what is essentially the wealthiest trading block on the planet, even their poorest member could afford to cover the entire union.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  More importantly for a vaccine that is sold at cost, the regional price that the IA got was $3 per dose, the commission stepped in trying to get it down to $2. Israel is paying $30 for its doses of the Pfizer vaccine and likely a similar amount for Moderna. If the EU would’ve paid as much as Israel is for 500M doses it would only cost them 15 billion $. That is peanuts in the grand scheme of things, the UK spent 16 billion a month to cover furlough payments ffs...
  - Hunisgung 6y ago
    > the regional price that the IA got was $3 per dose, the commission stepped in trying to get it down to $2. Meanwhile in France, I can do a RT-PCR test paid by the state (around 50$ AFAIK) every other day with no question asked.
    - 6y ago
slashbeats88 6y ago
The Europe vaccine disaster has become very seriuos
mrtksn 6y ago
I still don’t understand why EU did not consider the Chinese and Russian vaccines. Very populous countries are getting them and any distrust towards the reporting of these vaccines could have been scrutinized(Turkey run its own "stage 3" on the Chinese one, got its own numbers and is inspecting the deliveries for 2 weeks before vaccinating the population). Now we have this situation where EU is lagging behind very seriously and the allied countries say that they should have signed better contracts. Okay, do your thing on TikTok and Huawei businesses in your trade war but not even considering buying vaccines from them then being left behind and and arguing on contract technicalities is not OK.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  This is a political suicide in many countries+ the likelihood of people wanting to take it may be on the lower side.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    I’m sure dying off and keeping businesses shut will be huge political win when the allies return to normal. Everyone will appreciate the bad contract and simply not make big deal out of it. Take a knee for the western alliance. When we are on it, we should also ban Xiaomi and TikTok.
  - Clewza313 6y ago
    This. Singapore, an ethnically Chinese country, has announced they're buying Moderna, BioNTech and (Chinese) Sinovac, and approximately nobody trusts or wants to take the Chinese one.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Exactly. I have some friends in Singapore and the gov’t said “everyone will get a vaccine but you won’t have a choice as to which one you get”. Since they stand a better than 1/3 chance of getting SinoVac (since the other two will be reserved for the elderly as they have strong data) a lot of them are planning to delay getting vaccinated until more is known about SinoVac.
Exmoor 6y ago
I've been wondering when these chickens would come home to roost. There are a few countries who have heavily touted how many vaccines they've agreed to buy, but aren't being nearly as vocal about when they're going to actually have them in hand. Having contracts to vaccinate everyone in your country 4 times over doesn't do much good if you don't get those people any dose for another 9 months. It now seems plausible that countries like the US and and UK could have vaccinated everyone who wants to be by the beginning of summer. There are governments who have been fairly smug about their handling of the crisis who may be many months behind that schedule.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Only a few governments can be smug about how they handled Covid, and they are all in Asia (counting New Zealand and Australia as Asia, which is hand wavy). Even those who can make such a claim are still only one mistake from it all crashing down. Europe likes to think they are doing better than the US, but the truth is they are not very different.
  - Gravityloss 6y ago
    There are very different countries within Europe.
    - corty 6y ago
      Mishandling of COVID is on the EU to a large part. Not only for the vaccine procurement. The EU also, for a very long time, actively prevented meaningful border inspections and border lockdowns that would have prevented a lot of spillover from hard-hit to not-so-hard-hit countries. E.g. in county-level charts you can see which ones border on high- and low-COVID neighbours.
      - simongray 6y ago
        What are you talking about? Countries have been closing borders left and right, the EU hasn't prevented this.
Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods. Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this to work like the Novavax version of roughly the same thing that's just reported good U.K. trial results, but Sanofi/GSK's didn't provide a good enough response in the elderly. They were expected to fulfill up to half of the EU's requirements, but they're restarting with a new Phase I trial next month or so, and they might have something ready by the end of 2021. So if all that is correct, the EU ended up with a very big hole in their plans and not enough redundancy. By comparison only because I'm in the USA and familiar with our efforts, 5 big bets were made with more than a billion dollars each in up front R&D money. Moderna and now Novavax are looking very good, AZ/Oxford and one dose of Johnson and Johnson's is looking OK, with a two dose study in progress for the latter that might show increased efficacy, and only Sanofi/GSK failed in a really major way.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  EU pre-ordered more Pfizer than the US. Enough for 150 million people in EU, vs enough for 50 million in the US. The US has ordered more after it was approved.
  - outside1234 6y ago
    The EU did not pay as much as the US — and signed the contracts much later. Pfizer is doing the rational actor thing and, given a shortage, prioritizing their highest paying clients. There might also be verbiage in the US contract to this effect. Also, Pfizer is an American company.
    - Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
      There might also be verbiage in the US contract to this effect. Also, Pfizer is an American company. But also a multinational, manufacturing their vaccine in the US and Belgium. Initially without any help from Operation Warp Speed, which appears to be a mistake if their December claims about supply chain problems was true, along with eventually signing up to the program and moving up their promise for our second 100 million doses from the 3rd to 2nd quarter. But that Belgium plant? Something is so wrong with it they're shutting it down for a while to improve capacity ir so they claim. My only good guess is that they have a sterility problem and are finding they have to dump way too many lots they produce after testing for that.
Gravityloss 6y ago
There's lots of medical companies in most countries of EU. Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out? Why does the company X developed medicine only have to be made by company X? That's against the whole idea of patents, which is making information available and usable via licensing. Money shouldn't be the issue, the cost of the shots is negligible so there is not much profit to be made there. Instead licenses should be more profitable since time is worth a lot of money. There are also a lot of vaccines under development. There should always be multiple well resourced efforts under way. Unfortunately it seems some promising alternatives for development, testing or mass production have been starved for funding.
- outside1234 6y ago
  There were multiple efforts - but no reason to collaborate. And the French effort utterly failed to the point that they gave up. And Germany’s BioNTech signed an exclusive deal with Pfizer.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    If the vaccines were developed publicly, there would be no reason not to collaborate.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      If the vaccines were developed publicly there might not be any vaccines. This is not your ordinary flu shot.
      - corty 6y ago
        About a quarter of the long list of vaccines was developed by public universities. Almost all were developed with billions in public subsidies.
        barney54 6y ago
        mRNA vaccines are not your average vaccine.
99_00 6y ago
>First, U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech informed Brussels that it would be delivering far less vaccine than planned in the coming weeks. Which country isn't impacted by this?
- Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
  Every country is, because their manufacturing in the US is also disappointing, which Pfizer announced out of the blue in December. They've got issues so grave they're shutting down their Belgium plant to improve things in ways I haven't been able to made good guesses of, besides perhaps having a sterility problem.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
627467 6y ago
Only adjacent to this: am i wrong to think that in many places this lack of available vaccines in a predictable manner is leading to a staggered immunization and (unneeded?) delay of effective mass immunization? I mean: if you waited to stockpile large enough quantities first, you'd then be able to apply the vaccines quicker (given right logistics and man power) speeding up heard imunity. Am I wrong? Wouldn't this accumulation strategy make more sense even if it's harder to apply? I ask because it's clear that vaccination has become so political everywhere that govs are rushing to "start immunization" while not being able to garantee a sustainable rate of vaccinations.
- lovemenot 6y ago
  afaik these vaccines, once administered, have a long-lasting effect. It shouldn't matter then whether the same amount is applied all at once or little by little. But the latter approach has the benefit of some protection earlier. Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, but in conclusion, there should be no social health benefit in deliberately delaying vaccination.
throwaway4good 6y ago
We need to approve (or start trail programs of) vaccines from Russia, China, India. And we need to put export controls on EU-produced vaccines just as the US has. But we Europeans are too politically disorganised to do this and thus we loose out in particular to the US. The EU at a political level has been an absolute disaster through the Corona crises, from the lack of support of Italy when the virus initially hit, to uncoordinated petty tit-for-tat border closures, to now this failure of vaccine purchases.
tiku 6y ago
On top of that the Dutch government had a leak in their testing and vaccination database, leaking all the social security numbers, address data etc. Total clusterfuck.
- berkes 6y ago
  That is completely off topic. It's really bad in itself, but not related to vaccinations in any way. Correlating them is an Ad Hominem (ad institutum?) at best, and a libel at worst. By correlating those, politicians and 'alternative' media are using the (proven right) distrust for testing to distrust for vaccinations. That is disingenuous and dangerous.
ivanmaeder 6y ago
A redacted version of the EU-AstraZeneca contract has been made public since the article was written: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-europe-astrazneca-idUSKBN29Y1ED https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-europe... It's not clear to me but it seems that the EU wants AstraZeneca to use some additional factories in the UK that they're not currently using (?).
- ivanmaeder 6y ago
  Just saw this—the contract has been posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25960469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25960469
erkanerol 6y ago
As far as I see, some people are questioning why EU didn't prefer Chinese or Russian vaccines. I know only one of the Chinese vaccines: CoronaVac (developed by Sinovac) We still don't have clear phase 3 results. The announced results (by Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia) are so different. It is not easy to trust it at the moment. BUT WE ALREADY VACCINATED ALMOST TWO MILLIONS IN TURKEY :D So the real results are coming... Just wait a couple of weeks more.
- libertine 6y ago
  Why should we need Chinese or Russian vaccines if a large part of other vaccine production is being made in Europe? Basically USA and UK are hoarding their production and EU production, and EU are fulfilling orders for other parts of the world and not enough for itself - this doesn't seem balanced and EU should act swiftly to stop this bullshit.
  - Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
    The Sputnik V vaccine is by my count the 3rd to have solid and successful Phase III trial results, in December whereas the more modern technology mRNA vaccines got that in November. In 20/20 hindsight where we now know Sanofi/GSK failed hard in their first attempt, and one of of Sputnik V's virus vector doses is being tried with AZ/Oxford to improve efficacy, it would have been a very good idea to also place a bet on it, and following their business model set up one or more production facilities in the EU. Although given how AZ/Oxford's four late in the game EU factories have the very worst productivity of all of their's, would not for a while make a difference.
HugoDaniel 6y ago
"Europe is facing a vaccine disaster. Whereas countries like Israel, Britain and the United States. are quickly moving ahead with vaccinations, the EU is reeling from a string of setbacks. " this is a lie, per capita EU is not that bad considering that it is a coordinated effort (as opposed to a singular effort by a singular country). Overall this is Der Spiegel making an opinion article disguised as a news article. Shame on them.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  Your response is consistent with the claim you called a lie. Adding "considering that ..." allows you to hold the EU to an arbitrarily lower standard than the other countries.
  - HugoDaniel 6y ago
    I am a EU citizen, my standards are much higher. EU didn't had to sell their citizens healthcare data to move up the stack (like Israel did). The EU negotiations with these Big Pharma corps made it wait for these 3 countries (Israel, UK and USA). Vaccinations started 1 or 2 months later in EU (depending on country). A fair comparison would be the data of today in EU with the data from 1 or 2 months ago in those countries (per capita). But the big questions are: Why did we have to negotiate vaccines for a global pandemic? Why are countries moving up the stack with Big Pharma? Why is the vaccination rate higher in USA than in Mozambique?
    - exporectomy 6y ago
      To be honest, I don't know a thing about this topic. I just found it odd that you seemed to be acknowledging that what you called a lie could actually have been the truth. You still seem to be acknowledge that the EU is facing setbacks. Why negotiate? Because it's a scarce resource and has to be allocated somehow.
    - oli5679 6y ago
      The pharma companies you mention are all working hard to supply a vaccine to purchasers, at cost. The idea that they have some sort of profit motive and are deliberately delaying the EU is not true. Accounts of journalists, and the companies, suggest EU delayed contracts being signed because of internal disagreements, and haggling over contractual terms.
helge9210 6y ago
Assumption is "more vaccinated -- better outcome" which is not proven yet. In Israel (I'm israeli) almost two millions got two shots of Pfizer vaccine (starting from older population at risk and gradually including younger age groups). Amount of patients in serious or critical condition is growing. Amount of infected grows. This number is manipulated by changing the amount of tests and selection process. Those vaccinated are deliberately not tested so no information on infections after immunity is supposed to kick in.
- happymellon 6y ago
  Israel has a population of 9 million, if you only have 2 million vaccinated and people stop acting like it's a risk then of course the cases are going to go through the roof. If you have 6 million vaccinated, across the whole population not just old people, then you will see a decrease as the chances are that the people you meet will not be a vector. Until then, act like you are infected.
niffydroid 6y ago
I believe the UK contract is along the lines of "once you've met our order, you can ship UK made vaccines elsewhere" If the EU commission used their head, the sooner this was met they'd get it sooner and MORE vaccines. The EU had dropped the ball, stabbed it and ran it over. They make it seem the pharmaceutical companies are out to screw them. Far from it, the risk is being taken by government's and fully funded.
- libertine 6y ago
  Basically the EU was and still is being naive. USA and UK hoard production, while EU is seeing the stock go away. Maybe it's time to play the same type of ball game, level the play field, and lock all exports of vaccines until orders are leveled to the deadlines established.
oli5679 6y ago
It's helpful ro quantify different countries' vaccination rates. Current doses per hundred people (selected countries, 29 Jan) - Israel 53.5 - UK 12.3 - USA 8.4 - EU 2.6 - Spain 3.2 - Italy 3.0 - Germany 2.7 - France 2.0 https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
dd_roger 6y ago
What's most hilarious about this situation is that the EU getting cheaper vaccines than the UK was advertised as a major "Aha you shouldn't have left, see?" a month ago, but now the UK has already vaccinated almost as many people as the entire EU. Both the EU and its member countries fucked up so badly there aren't words strong enough to describe it. Reminds me of last spring when EU countries were blocking exports of medical supplies to eachothers. The EU appears weaker than ever with the corona crisis ; political cohesion between countries is low, economics are bad, and there's going to be a lot of resentment among the population.
- oli5679 6y ago
  I agree with your interpretation but disagree with your framing. To me such expensive errors are tragic not 'hilarous'. I am very sad about the distress and suffering this saga will cause Europeans.

208 points by danielfoster 6y ago

Archive: https://archive.is/D8X6u https://archive.is/D8X6u

This highlights one issue I've had with calls to secure more vaccine in the US and elsewhere. Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production - everyone has been making purchasing agreements and everyone knows that everybody is going to need it. These pushes to outbid other countries might go toward funding additional capacity for the next pandemic, but these corporations didn't have enough warning to know that they were the ones that'd need to make this investment so, for the moment, all of these countries securing additional doses are securing them out of the pockets of other countries.

plandis 6y ago
> Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production I was under the assumption that Project Warp Speed explicitly directed funding from the US government to help ramp up production while vaccines were still being tested. Did that not happen?
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  It did happen. But mRNA vaccines are new. The capacity needed to be built all along the supply chain. Months isn't a lot of time when you're talking about building new brick and mortar procduction infrastructure.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  It did, it just wasn't ambitious enough. There were separate grants, but the preorders were only enough to cover the entire population if multiple vaccines were approved. I guess it is possible that production was scaled up as fast as possible, but it seems that there was a lack of imagination in the planning process (setting low goals, not anticipating far enough ahead, etc).
  - Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
    From the now taken down Operation Warp Speed page, see here https://web.archive.org/web/20210119000857/https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/explaining-operation-warp-speed/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210119000857/https://www.hhs.g... 300 million doses from AZ, 100 million from Novavax, as mentioned in my other comment 100 million from Pfizer, 100 million from Sanofi/GSK which as mentioned failed, and a 100 million from Johnson and Johnson. Also mentions we signed the second 100 million dose contract with Moderna December 11th, that would be based their results which led to their submitting their application for an FDA Emergency Use Authorization on November 30th. See also lots of details on supply chain spending, well over a billion dollars. So while you're technically correct, with how much effort it takes to ramp up production, see how Johnson and Johnson isn't going to meet their early 12 million dose promise, I don't see our general approach as being wrong. Signing multiple 700 million dose contracts would not in any way speed production, that only happens when you get an initial contract and start making it. Which is exactly what Moderna and Pfizer did, quite some time before getting EUAs, lots of doses were shipped within days. Where I live, for Pfizer the Monday after the FDA's Friday issuance of an EUA. To a hospital which had rented an ultra-cold freezer to store it, a lot of work and money has gone into this hole process.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      Yeah, like $12 billion dollars. We are spending trillions on relief, so it's worth asking if more money spent on production could have accelerated things. A few tens of billions more would have been cheap! The vaccine shipments here (Michigan) have accelerated considerably since December, implying a pretty small head start on manufacturing. The distribution trends tab on https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98178_103214_103272-547150--,00.html https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98178_1032... shows the shipments.

jacquesm 6y ago

It's not just a vaccine disaster, it is a COVID disaster. The response to COVID in most of the developed world was a completely fuck up. We are still learning lessons that should have been learned a year ago, and there are still people everywhere - here too - that believe the best way to tackle a crisis of this magnitude is to stick your head in the sand and to pretend it isn't happening. I've definitely lost the illusion that mankind is able to rise to the challenge as a whole species, in spite of our smarts and our ability to communicate. Some of us will, and some of us won't, the winners will be the ones that adapt rapidly.

d1zzy 6y ago
I think humanity (as a species) is able to overcome situations like this, but not without large loss of life (and potentially setback in culture, technology, society). So I wouldn't be too concerned about humanity, just about our current civilization.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  Yes humanity has suffered and survived far worse than COVID-19, even if you imagine that nothing at all had been done to mitigte it.
trianglem 6y ago
We all intrinsically knew what to expect from and how to react to a pandemic. I honestly believe intentional misinformation from the Trump administration caused the massive bifurcation in dealing with this problem with a united front. Asian countries did not have this problem, and look at how much better they are faring.
- sn41 6y ago
  That was due to the lessons from SARS-Cov1 in 2003. Asian countries that did not suffer from SARS-Cov1 did very badly with covid-19. e.g. India. In India the misinformation was uniquely Indian - first they said that vegetarians will not get Covid, it came from bushmeat (ignoring the fact that human-to-human transmission was through cough droplets), then they said that Yoga fights Covid, then they blamed it on a minority gathering (ignoring the fact that people were streaming in unchecked through international airports through all of January and February 2020). One of the lessons taught in "crisis management", it seems, is to downplay an emergency so that the people do not panic. Death due to ignorance is much preferable?

outoftheabyss 6y ago

It’s been a strange week. We’ve seen left and right unite against Wall Street and Dublin, Belfast and London unite against Brussels.

duncans 6y ago
More Dublin than Belfast?
- outoftheabyss 6y ago
  All parties up north responded in the same way to Dublin?

cdavid 6y ago

I wonder if this will become a watershed moment for the EU. I've always been an ardent believer in the European program, both for historical reasons (I have French and German grand parents), but also because for all its warts, I believed the EU had a competent bureaucracy, able to go above the pettyness of national politics. French politicians of all side love scapegoating EU for their own failures. To say that the current situation shattered that conviction would be an understatement. I have no admiration for the Trump administration, but they objectively did almost everything better. It is also amusing and tragic to see all the core countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, etc.) all doing badly. They cannot frame this as a "cultural" or national failure of specific country like in 2011 at the peak of "Greek" crisis. And 2021 may well be worse than 2020 in number of life affected as populations are tired of various movement constraints, new virus strains coming up, etc. [edit] my comment comparing US vs the EU was about vaccines, not about the COVID handling in general. For the latter, comparing policies and impact is much harder. [edit 2] On #deaths, most countries in the EU and Europe in general did not do that much better than the US: France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands all have around ~0.08 - 0.12 % of their population that died from the disease (quite worse for Belgium). And Germany will likely reach that range as well.

trianglem 6y ago
The Trump administration spewed misinformation from day one that caused massive dissonance in dealing with the problem. Saying they did better when they had literally no plan and let 400,000 people die is incredible dissembling and most likely a political statement than a logical one. They literally dissuaded people from using masks.
- mikem170 6y ago
  A lot of people in our democracy might not agree with your assessment of this pandemic. A lot of people feel that 1 in 750 people dying, mostly older with comorbidities, is not the disaster for society that some seem to think it is. A lot of people think that giving up a year or two of their social and economic lives is not worth trying to avoid a 1 in 750, or 0.13%, chance of dying. Especially those, like the young, who have less than 1 in 100,000 chance of dying. Trying to tell them this is a catastrophe based on the numbers isn't going to work.

robotmay 6y ago

From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Which was a pretty big surprise to both the ROI and the UK. The first not being consulted on the decision, and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca. They've now backed out of this decision: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on-vaccine-exports-to-northern-ireland-trigger-diplomatic-row https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on... Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program, the EC/EU has made themselves look like total amateurs by whining about it in public and trying to shift the blame and conflating the UK & AstraZeneca. I think they really need to sit a bunch of the big names down together and actually plan their public strategy; Macron's been out today going in a completely different direction but somehow also circling back to blame the UK and simultaneously claiming (falsely) that the Oxford vaccine has a less than 10% success rate in over 65s, which probably isn't going to boost vaccine adoption: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macron-coronavirus-vaccine-exports-eu-controlled https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macro... It has been an...odd day, as someone who is a very pro-EU, remain-voting, UK citizen. God knows we deserve plenty of blame as a nation but I don't really feel like it's altogether deserved this time.

Hunisgung 6y ago
I know people at the European Medecines Agency that were angry at Ursula von der Leyen in December because she was always making public announcements (about the beginning and speed of the vaccination campaign) with no regard for the reality of regulatory activities or manufacturing and logistics constraints.
cosmodisk 6y ago
I'm also pro-EU,remainer,etc. The problem is that the EU is the political graveyard, because countries send the most absurd people there. Not all of them,of course,but a lot. EU works when things are going slow and because of the sheer economical scale and power, everybody takes it serious when it comes to negotiations. But the EC isn't a bunch of experts on rapid situations. It's exactly the same when a French civil servant complained that they are being outbid when buying masks, because the state can't pay upfront, while the Americans ( individuals) could,so essentially a 60 million people country ended up competing against a few individuals with cash. Same with vaccines: while the EK were trying to come up with something, Israelis already were calling around the globe to make sure they get it first.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> The EU negotiating team, according to people familiar with the talks, was intent on pushing down the price. In the middle of a pandemic that is literally costing trillions, this seems like the EU negotiators lost sight of the big picture.

robotmay 6y ago
I was under the assumption that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was being produced at cost under the agreement with Oxford University. I'm curious as to what cost savings they were after - possibly on distribution or in establishing the manufacturing bases?
- dogma1138 6y ago
  It is, but there are still regional price differences due to labor, manufacturing and supply chain costs. However trying to get a $3 vaccine down to $2 is laughable for what is essentially the wealthiest trading block on the planet, even their poorest member could afford to cover the entire union.
dogma1138 6y ago
More importantly for a vaccine that is sold at cost, the regional price that the IA got was $3 per dose, the commission stepped in trying to get it down to $2. Israel is paying $30 for its doses of the Pfizer vaccine and likely a similar amount for Moderna. If the EU would’ve paid as much as Israel is for 500M doses it would only cost them 15 billion $. That is peanuts in the grand scheme of things, the UK spent 16 billion a month to cover furlough payments ffs...
- Hunisgung 6y ago
  > the regional price that the IA got was $3 per dose, the commission stepped in trying to get it down to $2. Meanwhile in France, I can do a RT-PCR test paid by the state (around 50$ AFAIK) every other day with no question asked.
  - 6y ago

slashbeats88 6y ago

The Europe vaccine disaster has become very seriuos

mrtksn 6y ago

I still don’t understand why EU did not consider the Chinese and Russian vaccines. Very populous countries are getting them and any distrust towards the reporting of these vaccines could have been scrutinized(Turkey run its own "stage 3" on the Chinese one, got its own numbers and is inspecting the deliveries for 2 weeks before vaccinating the population). Now we have this situation where EU is lagging behind very seriously and the allied countries say that they should have signed better contracts. Okay, do your thing on TikTok and Huawei businesses in your trade war but not even considering buying vaccines from them then being left behind and and arguing on contract technicalities is not OK.

cosmodisk 6y ago
This is a political suicide in many countries+ the likelihood of people wanting to take it may be on the lower side.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  I’m sure dying off and keeping businesses shut will be huge political win when the allies return to normal. Everyone will appreciate the bad contract and simply not make big deal out of it. Take a knee for the western alliance. When we are on it, we should also ban Xiaomi and TikTok.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  This. Singapore, an ethnically Chinese country, has announced they're buying Moderna, BioNTech and (Chinese) Sinovac, and approximately nobody trusts or wants to take the Chinese one.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Exactly. I have some friends in Singapore and the gov’t said “everyone will get a vaccine but you won’t have a choice as to which one you get”. Since they stand a better than 1/3 chance of getting SinoVac (since the other two will be reserved for the elderly as they have strong data) a lot of them are planning to delay getting vaccinated until more is known about SinoVac.

Exmoor 6y ago

I've been wondering when these chickens would come home to roost. There are a few countries who have heavily touted how many vaccines they've agreed to buy, but aren't being nearly as vocal about when they're going to actually have them in hand. Having contracts to vaccinate everyone in your country 4 times over doesn't do much good if you don't get those people any dose for another 9 months. It now seems plausible that countries like the US and and UK could have vaccinated everyone who wants to be by the beginning of summer. There are governments who have been fairly smug about their handling of the crisis who may be many months behind that schedule.

bluGill 6y ago
Only a few governments can be smug about how they handled Covid, and they are all in Asia (counting New Zealand and Australia as Asia, which is hand wavy). Even those who can make such a claim are still only one mistake from it all crashing down. Europe likes to think they are doing better than the US, but the truth is they are not very different.
- Gravityloss 6y ago
  There are very different countries within Europe.
  - corty 6y ago
    Mishandling of COVID is on the EU to a large part. Not only for the vaccine procurement. The EU also, for a very long time, actively prevented meaningful border inspections and border lockdowns that would have prevented a lot of spillover from hard-hit to not-so-hard-hit countries. E.g. in county-level charts you can see which ones border on high- and low-COVID neighbours.
    - simongray 6y ago
      What are you talking about? Countries have been closing borders left and right, the EU hasn't prevented this.

Throwawayaerlei 6y ago

Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods. Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this to work like the Novavax version of roughly the same thing that's just reported good U.K. trial results, but Sanofi/GSK's didn't provide a good enough response in the elderly. They were expected to fulfill up to half of the EU's requirements, but they're restarting with a new Phase I trial next month or so, and they might have something ready by the end of 2021. So if all that is correct, the EU ended up with a very big hole in their plans and not enough redundancy. By comparison only because I'm in the USA and familiar with our efforts, 5 big bets were made with more than a billion dollars each in up front R&D money. Moderna and now Novavax are looking very good, AZ/Oxford and one dose of Johnson and Johnson's is looking OK, with a two dose study in progress for the latter that might show increased efficacy, and only Sanofi/GSK failed in a really major way.

maxerickson 6y ago
EU pre-ordered more Pfizer than the US. Enough for 150 million people in EU, vs enough for 50 million in the US. The US has ordered more after it was approved.
- outside1234 6y ago
  The EU did not pay as much as the US — and signed the contracts much later. Pfizer is doing the rational actor thing and, given a shortage, prioritizing their highest paying clients. There might also be verbiage in the US contract to this effect. Also, Pfizer is an American company.
  - Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
    There might also be verbiage in the US contract to this effect. Also, Pfizer is an American company. But also a multinational, manufacturing their vaccine in the US and Belgium. Initially without any help from Operation Warp Speed, which appears to be a mistake if their December claims about supply chain problems was true, along with eventually signing up to the program and moving up their promise for our second 100 million doses from the 3rd to 2nd quarter. But that Belgium plant? Something is so wrong with it they're shutting it down for a while to improve capacity ir so they claim. My only good guess is that they have a sterility problem and are finding they have to dump way too many lots they produce after testing for that.

Gravityloss 6y ago

There's lots of medical companies in most countries of EU. Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out? Why does the company X developed medicine only have to be made by company X? That's against the whole idea of patents, which is making information available and usable via licensing. Money shouldn't be the issue, the cost of the shots is negligible so there is not much profit to be made there. Instead licenses should be more profitable since time is worth a lot of money. There are also a lot of vaccines under development. There should always be multiple well resourced efforts under way. Unfortunately it seems some promising alternatives for development, testing or mass production have been starved for funding.

outside1234 6y ago
There were multiple efforts - but no reason to collaborate. And the French effort utterly failed to the point that they gave up. And Germany’s BioNTech signed an exclusive deal with Pfizer.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  If the vaccines were developed publicly, there would be no reason not to collaborate.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    If the vaccines were developed publicly there might not be any vaccines. This is not your ordinary flu shot.
    - corty 6y ago
      About a quarter of the long list of vaccines was developed by public universities. Almost all were developed with billions in public subsidies.
      - barney54 6y ago
        mRNA vaccines are not your average vaccine.

99_00 6y ago

>First, U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech informed Brussels that it would be delivering far less vaccine than planned in the coming weeks. Which country isn't impacted by this?

Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
Every country is, because their manufacturing in the US is also disappointing, which Pfizer announced out of the blue in December. They've got issues so grave they're shutting down their Belgium plant to improve things in ways I haven't been able to made good guesses of, besides perhaps having a sterility problem.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

627467 6y ago

Only adjacent to this: am i wrong to think that in many places this lack of available vaccines in a predictable manner is leading to a staggered immunization and (unneeded?) delay of effective mass immunization? I mean: if you waited to stockpile large enough quantities first, you'd then be able to apply the vaccines quicker (given right logistics and man power) speeding up heard imunity. Am I wrong? Wouldn't this accumulation strategy make more sense even if it's harder to apply? I ask because it's clear that vaccination has become so political everywhere that govs are rushing to "start immunization" while not being able to garantee a sustainable rate of vaccinations.

lovemenot 6y ago
afaik these vaccines, once administered, have a long-lasting effect. It shouldn't matter then whether the same amount is applied all at once or little by little. But the latter approach has the benefit of some protection earlier. Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, but in conclusion, there should be no social health benefit in deliberately delaying vaccination.

throwaway4good 6y ago

We need to approve (or start trail programs of) vaccines from Russia, China, India. And we need to put export controls on EU-produced vaccines just as the US has. But we Europeans are too politically disorganised to do this and thus we loose out in particular to the US. The EU at a political level has been an absolute disaster through the Corona crises, from the lack of support of Italy when the virus initially hit, to uncoordinated petty tit-for-tat border closures, to now this failure of vaccine purchases.

tiku 6y ago

On top of that the Dutch government had a leak in their testing and vaccination database, leaking all the social security numbers, address data etc. Total clusterfuck.

berkes 6y ago
That is completely off topic. It's really bad in itself, but not related to vaccinations in any way. Correlating them is an Ad Hominem (ad institutum?) at best, and a libel at worst. By correlating those, politicians and 'alternative' media are using the (proven right) distrust for testing to distrust for vaccinations. That is disingenuous and dangerous.

ivanmaeder 6y ago

A redacted version of the EU-AstraZeneca contract has been made public since the article was written: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-europe-astrazneca-idUSKBN29Y1ED https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-europe... It's not clear to me but it seems that the EU wants AstraZeneca to use some additional factories in the UK that they're not currently using (?).

ivanmaeder 6y ago
Just saw this—the contract has been posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25960469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25960469

erkanerol 6y ago

As far as I see, some people are questioning why EU didn't prefer Chinese or Russian vaccines. I know only one of the Chinese vaccines: CoronaVac (developed by Sinovac) We still don't have clear phase 3 results. The announced results (by Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia) are so different. It is not easy to trust it at the moment. BUT WE ALREADY VACCINATED ALMOST TWO MILLIONS IN TURKEY :D So the real results are coming... Just wait a couple of weeks more.

libertine 6y ago
Why should we need Chinese or Russian vaccines if a large part of other vaccine production is being made in Europe? Basically USA and UK are hoarding their production and EU production, and EU are fulfilling orders for other parts of the world and not enough for itself - this doesn't seem balanced and EU should act swiftly to stop this bullshit.
- Throwawayaerlei 6y ago
  The Sputnik V vaccine is by my count the 3rd to have solid and successful Phase III trial results, in December whereas the more modern technology mRNA vaccines got that in November. In 20/20 hindsight where we now know Sanofi/GSK failed hard in their first attempt, and one of of Sputnik V's virus vector doses is being tried with AZ/Oxford to improve efficacy, it would have been a very good idea to also place a bet on it, and following their business model set up one or more production facilities in the EU. Although given how AZ/Oxford's four late in the game EU factories have the very worst productivity of all of their's, would not for a while make a difference.

HugoDaniel 6y ago

"Europe is facing a vaccine disaster. Whereas countries like Israel, Britain and the United States. are quickly moving ahead with vaccinations, the EU is reeling from a string of setbacks. " this is a lie, per capita EU is not that bad considering that it is a coordinated effort (as opposed to a singular effort by a singular country). Overall this is Der Spiegel making an opinion article disguised as a news article. Shame on them.

exporectomy 6y ago
Your response is consistent with the claim you called a lie. Adding "considering that ..." allows you to hold the EU to an arbitrarily lower standard than the other countries.
- HugoDaniel 6y ago
  I am a EU citizen, my standards are much higher. EU didn't had to sell their citizens healthcare data to move up the stack (like Israel did). The EU negotiations with these Big Pharma corps made it wait for these 3 countries (Israel, UK and USA). Vaccinations started 1 or 2 months later in EU (depending on country). A fair comparison would be the data of today in EU with the data from 1 or 2 months ago in those countries (per capita). But the big questions are: Why did we have to negotiate vaccines for a global pandemic? Why are countries moving up the stack with Big Pharma? Why is the vaccination rate higher in USA than in Mozambique?
  - exporectomy 6y ago
    To be honest, I don't know a thing about this topic. I just found it odd that you seemed to be acknowledging that what you called a lie could actually have been the truth. You still seem to be acknowledge that the EU is facing setbacks. Why negotiate? Because it's a scarce resource and has to be allocated somehow.
  - oli5679 6y ago
    The pharma companies you mention are all working hard to supply a vaccine to purchasers, at cost. The idea that they have some sort of profit motive and are deliberately delaying the EU is not true. Accounts of journalists, and the companies, suggest EU delayed contracts being signed because of internal disagreements, and haggling over contractual terms.

helge9210 6y ago

Assumption is "more vaccinated -- better outcome" which is not proven yet. In Israel (I'm israeli) almost two millions got two shots of Pfizer vaccine (starting from older population at risk and gradually including younger age groups). Amount of patients in serious or critical condition is growing. Amount of infected grows. This number is manipulated by changing the amount of tests and selection process. Those vaccinated are deliberately not tested so no information on infections after immunity is supposed to kick in.

happymellon 6y ago
Israel has a population of 9 million, if you only have 2 million vaccinated and people stop acting like it's a risk then of course the cases are going to go through the roof. If you have 6 million vaccinated, across the whole population not just old people, then you will see a decrease as the chances are that the people you meet will not be a vector. Until then, act like you are infected.

niffydroid 6y ago

I believe the UK contract is along the lines of "once you've met our order, you can ship UK made vaccines elsewhere" If the EU commission used their head, the sooner this was met they'd get it sooner and MORE vaccines. The EU had dropped the ball, stabbed it and ran it over. They make it seem the pharmaceutical companies are out to screw them. Far from it, the risk is being taken by government's and fully funded.

libertine 6y ago
Basically the EU was and still is being naive. USA and UK hoard production, while EU is seeing the stock go away. Maybe it's time to play the same type of ball game, level the play field, and lock all exports of vaccines until orders are leveled to the deadlines established.

oli5679 6y ago

It's helpful ro quantify different countries' vaccination rates. Current doses per hundred people (selected countries, 29 Jan) - Israel 53.5 - UK 12.3 - USA 8.4 - EU 2.6 - Spain 3.2 - Italy 3.0 - Germany 2.7 - France 2.0 https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

dd_roger 6y ago

What's most hilarious about this situation is that the EU getting cheaper vaccines than the UK was advertised as a major "Aha you shouldn't have left, see?" a month ago, but now the UK has already vaccinated almost as many people as the entire EU. Both the EU and its member countries fucked up so badly there aren't words strong enough to describe it. Reminds me of last spring when EU countries were blocking exports of medical supplies to eachothers. The EU appears weaker than ever with the corona crisis ; political cohesion between countries is low, economics are bad, and there's going to be a lot of resentment among the population.

oli5679 6y ago
I agree with your interpretation but disagree with your framing. To me such expensive errors are tragic not 'hilarous'. I am very sad about the distress and suffering this saga will cause Europeans.