41 ms·

EU vaccine rollout severely lags behind

239 points by undefined1 6y ago

junippor 6y ago
CTRL-F bureaucracy Cue HN complaining how much "bureaucracy" and how much "red tape" the EU has, and smth smth socialism.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  But that is the problem here isn't it? Why else would the EU be 3 months behind the UK.
  - dundarious 6y ago
    No that's probably not the problem, if this (plausible) thread is accurate: https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1372897635577761803 https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1372897635577761803 Edit: I'm not sure I buy the proposed argument that in a way, "the EU believed in the free market and fair play too much, and the US and UK betrayed those noble ideals", but I do believe the EU failed to recognize and/or counter the state of play, that the US and UK had legislated production partners and output to stay within national borders.
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      I think the EU even today is still boasting about how they saved a few euros on the vaccines. Such an great deal, when someone else pays for the consequences.
  - the_why_of_y 6y ago
    The EU appears to be of the opinion that it needs to net export 8 million vaccine doses a month to the UK (plus 17 million to other countries, although the article doesn't detail if any doses are imported from those countries). https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/eu-exported-more-than-8-million-vaccines-to-uk-in-february-1.4506764 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/eu-exported-mor...
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    There are two issues: UK and US nationalism preventing companies to shift finished products to the EU in case of production troubles, while the EU has been slow to impose restrictions in the other ways. This meant that when the AZ plant in Belgium got production problems the EU had to take the shortfall alone instead of it being distributed on all customers: the upshot of this is that UK has simply gotten more vaccines than the EU. The second problem is largely national: some countries have been slow to use the severely reduced deliveries they have gotten (possibly because their schedules were screwed up by the shortfall). The national governments have been really happy to pretend the national programs are perfect and there aren't large stockpiles of unused vaccines in their countries, and to blame all the tardiness on the shortfall "from the EU".
    - mattmanser 6y ago
      Nationalism? The Astrazeneca vaccines was paid for by the UK 3 months before the EU. Not 3 weeks, 3 months. The same production problems with the EU batch happened to the UK one, as far as I know, but they had time to fix it because of those extra 3 months. Now the EU want to jump the queue and give it out "evenly", because it suits them. And if the shoe was on the other foot, they'd be saying 'je suis desolé, we have no vaccine for you British because of Brexit'. And you know it. Plus they've been talking down the British strategy so much now their own citizens are wasting what Astrazeneca supplies they do have, so it'd be a complete waste.
polytely 6y ago
I really wish this graph included individual EU countries because the vaccination strategy is specific per country
- generaljelly 6y ago
  I agree. I would love to know the specifics of any country in detail. Or a least a deeper understanding of medicine distribution in the EU. Any chance someome can explain and talk about it?
- buster 6y ago
  I think the EU is ordering and distributing the vaccines for the member states in order to do it even and fair (not sure how this works out in reality, though).
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    They coordinate purchases and deliveries at a national level only. It's a very long way down from a truck leaving the factory destined towards a country and someone getting stabbed in the arm by a professional, and all of that work is on the national agencies.
- pacificmint 6y ago
  A lot of the European countries are all at a similiar point, most likely cause the vaccines were procured together. Spain, Italy, France and Germany are virtually identical, on a per capita basis. Hungary is a little ahead, as they are also using the Russian vaccine. But still behind the US.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    Italian company Adienne Pharma & Biotech has signed the deal to produce Russian vaccine domestically. They are waiting however for the approval of said vaccine by the EU.
- blibble 6y ago
  the only countries doing well are those that have stepped outside of the EU commission's bungled programme
bayareabadboy 6y ago
Is Britain doing better than EU? I know nothing but that seems like an easy comparison, right?
- toyg 6y ago
  A better comparison is with US, China, or Russia. And yes, it doesn't look very good. The rollout has been slow for a number of reasons, from actual resistance in some countries to the well-publicised shenanigans with manufacturers. Also, Europeans export a significant portion of their vaccine production, unlike others.
- philjohn 6y ago
  Well, the UK is prioritising getting as many people a first dose as possible, so the number "fully" vaccinated in the UK lags behind the EU. Jury is still somewhat out about which method is better, and who will finish first. I'd put money on both reaching 70% of eligible people vaccinated with both doses around the same time.
  - toyg 6y ago
    It's even more complex than that, since some countries have now switched to UK-like intervals between doses (11 weeks)... but not all. And there are a bunch of country-specific issues too. This is one of those situations where "EU" as a concept is a bit of an overgeneralization for 27 loosely-coordinating countries.
  - jariel 6y ago
    Yes, but the UK is so far ahead with jabs/person that it's going to make a the bigger difference. The volume of jabs will dictate the outcome more than the 1-now-1-much-later or 1-now-1-soon strategies.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  Britain is one of the fastest vaccinating countries in the world. Maybe THE fastest (they're over 50% adults vaccinated already), ignoring smaller countries like Israel who don't have to worry about scale quite as msuch. Britain erred on the side of faster rollout: many countries criticize them for rushing AZ's vaccine approval process actually. Because Britain somewhat rushed the vaccine rollout, its probably not a fair comparison to other countries. USA vs EU is probably a better comparison (but maybe not, because USA has a *dominating* industrial base and can physically make more things than most other countries)
odiroot 6y ago
Well, Hungary is in EU and they seem to be doing much better than the rest.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  They are going with Chinese and Russian vaccines (and for a 10Mi country a small number will bump the per capita numbers nicely) Not a bad strategy but it doesn't scale (especially for the Sputnik V current production capability)
- yosito 6y ago
  Hungary decided to bypass EU regulators and approve several vaccines that aren't approved in the EU, as well as procure them with their own deals.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    There is no need to bypass the EU regulators as each EU country has its own regulatory body which has national authority. The EU is a trade-bloc, full stop. The EMA is there to make it easier for pharma.
    - bhelkey 6y ago
      > The EMA is there to make it easier for pharma The highest vaccination rate of any EU country is Hungry with about half of the US's rate which in turn is a bit behind the UK[1]. In light of this, I am curious how you see EMA making it easier for pharma. Is there an underlying issue that I a missing? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1194939/rate-covid-vaccination-by-county-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1194939/rate-covid-vacci...
  - the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
    You don't need to bypass regulators, all countries can approve it themselves. That's also how the UK approved their vaccines before the Brexit deal took effect.
- 6y ago
config_yml 6y ago
In Switzerland it's the same. In my state/canton they don't even have enough vaccine for the high risk group of 240k people.
- garbaty_ciul 6y ago
  This is exceptionally sad due to the country being 1) rich 2) with small population (comparable to Israel) 3) big in pharma industry Yet from what i see the public discourse is most concerned about opening up restaurant terraces, etc. and not the immense economical damage that having late vaccination campaign will inflict.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - nairboon 6y ago
    What can you expect from an exceptionally incompetent government. Today the Johnson vaccine was approved by the Swiss "FDA", but the government actually forgot to this day to order any doses of that vaccine... Instead they ordered Novavax & Curevac which didn't even apply for approval in Switzerland.
raverbashing 6y ago
"Severely lags behind" well, only if we're considering the top performers Countries that are ahead of the EU (on avg.) per person doses are mostly small (Israel, UAE, Chile). Comparable are the UK, US and China In terms of actual doses the EU is behind the US and maybe China (debatable numbers). The rest are behind https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=425..latest&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=population&Metric=Vaccinations&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~ISR~GBR~ARE~EuropeanUnion~BRA~CHN~IDN~BGD~RUS~MEX~CHL~European+Union https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
- 2trill2spill 6y ago
  According to the Bloomberg tracker[1] the United states has given 24.9% of the population at least one shot and 13.5% two shots. The EU has given 8.7% one dose and 3.8% two doses. The United States is administrating 2.5 million doses a day and the EU is administrating 1.1 million doses a day, although the EU has a larger population. Also the rate of vaccines administered in the EU is down from 1.5 million a day from the prior week, while the US rate is going up. So severely behind seems about right. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    "Severely behind" the country doing the most vaccinations per day, but not on a general comparison. (Though yes last week the amount given was lower) I completely agree the EU could be doing a better job, but in terms of general comparison, it's not doing bad (It's doing better than Canada/Australia/Japan) for example.
    - thehappypm 6y ago
      No, it's doing bad. Canada should, by all means, be doing much worse than the EU, being a politically low-power country. Being roughly the same as the EU is bad. Australia basically has eradicated covid. Japan has the pandemic largely under control as well. The EU, for all its socialism and condescension of the US, should by all means be clobbering the US. But it's getting clobbered.
vrepsys 6y ago
The EU has failed to secure contracts ensuring the EU produced vaccine stays in the EU[1]. So far the EU has exported 41.6 million doses of the vaccine (the largest importer being the UK)[2]. Both the US and the UK have exported 0 vaccines. [1] https://twitter.com/davekeating/status/1372897635577761803 https://twitter.com/davekeating/status/1372897635577761803 [2] https://twitter.com/AlexTaylorNews/status/1373621472607010817 https://twitter.com/AlexTaylorNews/status/137362147260701081...
- dundarious 6y ago
  AFAIK you are correct except perhaps that US and UK have exported 0 vaccines, though the number is probably quite small relatively speaking, and certainly smaller than the EU (foolishly) expected.
- FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
  This os the EU being a good ally. The expectation was that the UK and US would also help by exporting part of their production, which was indeed dumb. The US also didnt secure such contracts, they simply forbid any export. The UK is helped by AZ not sending anything produced in the UK to the EU, despite the EU contract stipulating that doses would also come from the UK.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    Not just that; quite a lot of EU AZ production goes to the UK, too.
    - koyote 6y ago
      Do you have a source on that? I was under impression that the UK manufactures their entire AZ stock and the only vaccine produced in the EU for the UK is Pfizer/BioNTech
      - kuschku 6y ago
        70% of the doses the EU bought were instead delivered to the UK to fulfill AZ's obligation to the UK. After that initial batch, a further 8 million EU doses were exported to the UK, and a further 46 million EU doses were exported to other countries, including the US. Just this second batch would have tripled the EU's vaccination rate so far.
jiripospisil 6y ago
You can see some statistics for the Czech Republic (population is about 10.7 million) at [0]. Vykázaná očkování celkem = Administered total Vykázaná očkování za včera = Administered in the previous day Osoby s ukončeným očkováním (dvě dávky) celkem = People with complete vaccination (two shots) total Osoby s ukončeným očkováním celkem za včera = People with complete vaccination in the previous day [0] https://onemocneni-aktualne.mzcr.cz/vakcinace-cr https://onemocneni-aktualne.mzcr.cz/vakcinace-cr
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
  Poland has this: https://www.gov.pl/web/szczepimysie/raport-szczepien-przeciwko-covid-19 https://www.gov.pl/web/szczepimysie/raport-szczepien-przeciw... Liczba szczepień 1 dawką = first doses administered Liczba szczepień 2 dawką = second doses administered Liczba dawek dostarczonych do Polski = doses delivered from suppliers Liczba dawek dostarczonych do punktów = doses delivered to vaccination points Zamówienia w trakcie realizacji = doses assigned to a vaccination point, but not yet administered Stan magazynu = warehouse stock, unclear if this is for second doses (methodology changed last week) Keep in mind that we typically get vaccines on Monday and vaccinate throughout the week - yesterday there were ~5k available doses in the whole of Poland
- MayeulC 6y ago
  To keep with the thread. France (67M): https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/suivi-vaccination?location=FRA https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/suivi-vaccination?loc... premières doses = first doses (6.1M) rendez-vous prévus cette semaine = appointments this week (0.5M) There is a second tab dedicated to logistics: https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/logistique-vaccins?location=FRA https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/logistique-vaccins?lo... That makes it about 10M delivered to date. Vaccination is primarily supply-restricted, only the elderly (75+, or 50+ with preconditions), and medical/strategic personnel (inc firefighters) can get vaccinated for now. At current pace (last two weeks), it would take ~10 months to get 80% vaccinated with one dose... :/
phtrivier 6y ago
Headline could have read : "player that manufacture, use and export resource lags behind players that manufacture, use, and don't export resource". A terrible twitter threat summarized this as "UE played expecting fair play. This now looks naive." https://mobile.twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1372897635577761803 https://mobile.twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/13728976355777... I love bitching at my government like every one else, but it can't see what logistics you can improve to vaccinate more people when you don't exactly have vaccines. Oh, and great play by FB to make sure no one below 30 in europe wants a vaccine, you played well for team USA on this one ! I suppose this will serve as a "never again" shock for bringing back some factories in the EU. Or it will simply serve as a stepping stone for nationalist who will just make things a tad worse, before it (maybe) (one hopes) (who knows ?) gets better.
- strictnein 6y ago
  Always like when Twitter threads that are supposed to be sources of "truth" says stuff like this: > "Meanwhile in March 2020, President Trump tried unsuccessfully to steal BioNTech from Germany" They tried to buy the company. Not sure when "Buy" became "Steal" > "Trump seemed to be in no hurry to sign Pfizer purchase contracts. " He then links to an article about how they weren't rushing to buy additional vaccines on top of the 100 million already purchased. So, again, highly misleading. Not buying additional vaccines just became "in no hurry to sign Pfizer purchase contracts"
jariel 6y ago
Here are national breakdowns: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
- Aardwolf 6y ago
  I wish this website would allow having a link to an individual country, every time you refresh you have to deselect all default countries again and add the country you're interested in again
  - _Microft 6y ago
    You can link to a graph with a particular selection of countries directly. There is a symbol with connected dots in the bottom right corner of the graph that allows to copy a link to it as it is shown. Example: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=346..latest&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=population&Metric=Vaccinations&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
gaha 6y ago
The EU has exported 41 millionen vaccine doses of which the UK has gotten 8 million so far [1]. Meanwhile, the UK and US do not export any vaccines at all. So just as a back of the envelope calculation, with 41 millionen doeses the EU could have vaccinated an additional 10% of its population, while the UK would have had more than 10% less vaccinatetions without those 8 million. This would not completetly close the gap, but the numbers would be quite different then. Anyway, you can interpret this in a postivie way: the EU is trying to be good and is sharing its vaccinations more or less fairly with other countries (for now). However, you can also see it as the EU has no real power at all and is just an easy target to get fooled over by other countries.. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-eu-not-ready-to-share-covid-vaccines-with-poorer-countries/a-56944274 https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-eu-not-ready-to-share-covi...
- xiphias2 6y ago
  I'm not sure that I would call the number of Pfitzer/BioNTech vaccines exported to young people in Israel fair so that they can party, while my parents inside the EU are waiting locked in for half a year now because they are scared of dying (and some of their friends already dead from COVID :( )
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    The EU decided to spend 750 billion euro of money it does not have (on credit - see [0]) for post-Covid recovery, but at the same time decided to save as much as possible on vaccines. I think that 'penny wise, pound foolish' applies. It would be unfair to Israel if they paid extra surcharge for their vaccines and later were told by European authorities "sorry, we will confiscate them, bad luck." If we instead paid some 10 extra euro per dose, it would have added up to about 1 per cent of the planned recovery fund - and an extra factory or two could have been built during last autumn to start cranking out the vaccines by millions as soon as approved. [0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-agrees-on-750-billion-euro-recovery-fund/av-54252633 https://www.dw.com/en/eu-agrees-on-750-billion-euro-recovery...
    - ThalesX 6y ago
dang 6y ago
Recent and related: Europe's Vaccine Disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964197 - Jan 2021 (418 comments) I think there have been other threads as well?
svara 6y ago
This is the wrong thing to complain about. At this point vaccine distribution is a zero-sum game. You might just as well frame it as "EU refrains from pushing itself to the front of the line". This thing isn't over before vaccine availability isn't production-limited anymore. The real mistake that the EU made was to not realize early on that vaccine production was going to be a huge issue in 2021, and make fixing that a priority.
- markus92 6y ago
  From a public health perspective, it's not zero sum. One country fully vaccinated and another equally sized country not vaccinated, leads to higher strain on the healthcare system than both countries 50% vaccinated. Pareto principle applies to hospitalizations.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  Very untrue. COVID being much, much higher-risk in top age brackets means vaccinating the top age brackets everywhere first is a lot more beneficial than vaccinating country-by-country. Same reason why your country (whichever it is) likely made priority groups for vaccine distribution rather than make it a free-for-all. And the first 15-20% or so of vaccines administered are CRITICAL. In true pareto principle, 80% of hospitalizations come from 20% of the population. I'm in Belgium. We are facing a third wave. We're going back into lockdown pretty soon (it's almost certain). With just 400k more vaccines administered, we would not be in this mess. 400k. The US vaccinates 3 million every day.
  - svara 6y ago
    The EU has received enough vaccine for everyone over 70-something. But it doesn't change anything about whether there's a third wave or not. If you chose not to do a lockdown in the third wave because "older people are already vaccinated" that would just mean that your hospitals would fill up with younger people instead, since total number infected would be much higher than ever before.
    - scrollaway 6y ago
standardUser 6y ago
Most of Europe was much slower to approve vaccines than the US and UK. Because of that, I've assumed since the first approvals in December that Europe would lag. Once the US, UK and others said "hey, we're ready to buy all the vaccines, send us what you'e got", what did we expect would happen? I don't know why Europe lagged on the approvals, but it seems obvious that would also lead to a lag in rollout.
- dundarious 6y ago
  I find the information in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544947 credible, and they indicate that approval is not the major issue. Instead, the EU's contracts with the pharma companies cannot be met, because the US and UK legislated/contracted to bind local production to local use, with the UK even specifically requiring/strongly encouraging Oxford to use a UK pharma company (instead of a US one) in order to ensure they could bind local production to local use.
  - manmal 6y ago
    Exactly. We in the EU are supply limited. In Austria, the first Pfizer shot was given before Christmas, and we are still at only 4% fully immunized (12% got at least one shot). We are even continuing to vaccinate while other countries have stopped AZ because of the recently reported potential issues - still doesn’t move the needle much.
- derriz 6y ago
  The FDA has yet to approve AstraZeneca's vaccine while the EU approved it back in January. The US has a stockpile of 40million doses which are not being used until approval arrives while European vaccination rates are limited by vaccine supply. Approval speed has nothing to do with it.
  - tabtab 6y ago
    The US should allow AstraZeneca to be used on volunteers in other nations, as long as it's not under coercion. The possible blot-clot issue is small, if any. Thus, volunteers is a decent compromise, rather than let it sit in storage.
VBprogrammer 6y ago
My partner, who is 32 with only minor underlying health issues, received her first jab yesterday. I'm obviously pleased that she will shortly have some degree of protection both for her sake and for our daughter and I, since my partner is the only one who has to leave the house for work. However, at the same time, I can't help feel that we've jumped the queue slightly. The EU is experiencing another wave which will doubtlessly culminate in thousands of deaths, the majority will be from people older or with much more serious health complications than my partner. I'm kinda sick of reading these debates about who ordered what and when under what conditions. There is a complete lack of compassion, we should be doing what we can to help those countries who still have older people unvaccinated. We can wait another couple of months before our holidays to Blackpool and Stalyvegas.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  So why help the EU - why should they jump the queue before Africa or India or China?
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    I'm not sure what part of what I said you've misread as only helping the EU. For the avoidance of doubt, I think we should act with compassion, trying to save lives regardless of the place those people were born in.
    - breakfastduck 6y ago
      I agree with that, but the UK was one of the first countries to stump up cash and start developing a vaccine before it'd even got bad in the UK. That's basically the reason, it was part of the contract that we get first dibs if fund it. I don't think EU countries putting out bad press about the AstraZenica vaccine is doing them any favors either - it's the company they're in negotiations with! Not saying what's fair or isn't here but that's the reality.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  > We can wait another couple of months before our holidays to Blackpool and Stalyvegas Speak for yourself. I'm not being glib. Compassion is wearing thin. There are anti-lockdown protests all over the UK and EU. There is a limit to how much more the ordinary citizen can endure. If that means that some people have to risk death then perhaps, as awful as it sounds, that may be for the best. They're the ones who should stay at home. And yes, I do have elderly relatives who are at risk.
tablespoon 6y ago
The free market saves the day again! https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/world/europe/europe-vaccine-rollout-astrazeneca.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/world/europe/europe-vacci... > While Washington went into business with the drug companies, Europe was more fiscally conservative and trusted the free market.
BurningFrog 6y ago
I'll just note that without any factories of their own, Israel managed to get more vaccines than any other country. As I understand it, because they were ready to pay whatever it costs. Which, if you look at the numbers, is not much at all.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  The UAE is also up to 80%. Having a population of 8M helps a lot. If Israel (or the UAE) had a population of 350M - they would not be even close to 100% vaccinated.
  - atilaneves 6y ago
    Switzerland has a population of 8.6M, isn't part of the EU, and yet... The problem there has been getting enough doses delivered.
- Voloskaya 6y ago
  > As I understand it, because they were ready to pay whatever it costs. That particular cost wasn't financial though. It was a promise to fast track rollout where other countries wanted to go through lengthy approval and review processes (I am not saying lengthy == bad in that case), vaccinate their population as fast as possible and share data about efficacy with the manufacturers. The Israeali government was ready to take risks that many other countries weren't.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    Interesting! I didn't know that! I found an article confirming this. Though it also says > "Israel paid about $30 per dose, almost double what other nations did" I'm always shocked by how little money that is. $3000 per dose would be cheap!!! https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/01/05/the-secret-sauce-behind-israels-successful-covid-19-vaccination-program/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/01/05/the-secre...
    - 6y ago
Mvandenbergh 6y ago
Behind whom? I mean, I get it, my own country is doing badly even compared to other EU countries but we need to keep in mind that the EU is at 10% or so vaccinated which is a lot more than almost any other major country or political bloc. If you show only the UK and US as comparators, it looks really bad but that's a hard comparison set to go up against. It's actually really ironic that the the UK and US took an approach that most people would consider a very European one by directly involving themselves and investing up-front in vaccine production while the European Commission took the neoliberal route of placing commercial orders in most cases and doing some but much less direct investment. What has ended up happening is basically the confluence of suboptimal but not necessarily bad decision making and some really bad luck. The EU, UK, and US all bought large portfolios of vaccines, enough a few times over if they all worked. They also all invested up-front in R&D, the EU proportionally less per head of population but of course many EU countries are not so rich and do not have so much domestic biotech/pharma so this has to be seen in that context as well. The EU is not all France/Benelux/Germany which do have such industries. All three gambled that their portfolios would pay off. US went heavy on J&J, Pfizer/Biontech, Moderna (not as sure about the US portfolio but loads of others) UK went for AZ, Valneva, GSK/Sanofi, Novavax, Pfizer/Biontech, (and later bought some Moderna but not much and only after it was approved). There is some kind of future agreement with CureVac which was only recently concluded. EU went for Pfizer-Biontech, AZ, J&J GSK/Sanofi, CureVac, Moderna. I think there have been discussions with Novavax and Valneva but no concrete orders. (UK and EU have the vaccines roughly in order of order size) So what happened? Essentially the Pfizer vaccine worked brilliantly and they seem to have gotten their scale-up working quite well. Good for EU and UK both. AZ works well (probably slightly less well, and with quite a lot of evidence that the decision not to use the stabilised fusion protein is what is making a difference to performance against certain variants) but AZ is having an absolute nightmare getting their yields up. This has affected all their global production - they had intended to delivery 30m doses to the UK by September... 2020 and 100m by the end of the year and clearly have not been able to. Making biological products is really hard, clearly. This has slowed down both the UK and EU roll-outs but because the UK scale-up started earlier (note my comments above about investment agreements, they started production scaling at their Oxford site as early as April 2020) they are further in the production ramp and of course most of the UK delay was before the vaccine was approved. So despite their UK order technically being later than their EU order, it has been felt much harder in the EU because the "lateness" of the UK order mostly happened before the vaccine (or any other vaccine) was approved. The GSK/Sanofi vaccine has been postponed and may never see the light of day. Novavax has had good results and is currently preparing for the approval process. Both the UK and EU had hoped to use either AZ or GSK/Sanofi as their "workhorse" vaccine but the UK had slightly less emphasis on it and bought / invested in more doses of vaccine per head. The EU has not done a great job here but it's also not abject failure, they've just had some bad luck in that simultaneously their two biggest orders were cancelled and slowed down. It could easily have been the case that a different set of vaccines didn't work and/or were hard to make and then it might be the US or the UK with the problem. I think before we draw big picture conclusions (apart from Ursula vdL being useless, but I think any German who remembered how good she was at defence procurement could have told you that) we need to remember that to some extent there are historical contingencies at play here and we can end up over-fitting by assuming that literally every difference we see is due to structural problems/advantages faced by one side or another.
dependsontheq 6y ago
Well it’s all just hindsight - depending on which vaccines are approved first different countries would have one this race. The EU is a bit of a nicer player internationally in general because the only thing holding it together are the common market rules so it is very rules focused. I think talking about winning or failed vaccination campaigns might be a bit early.
klelatti 6y ago
Leaving aside the politics is anyone surprised that roll-out has been slower when organised (to a material extent) by a multinational organisation whose normal modus operandi is to build consensus amongst its members even if this takes time (I've experienced it at first hand). Contrast this with the UK which has a very centralised governance model and a centralised single payer health system. Not being critical of or praising either model or behaviour in either case. Just not surprising that this happens when the challenge is to deliver on a clear objective as rapidly as possible. (And still disappointing that EU citizens have to deal with the results of this).
groos 6y ago
People have friends but nations have interests. Looks like the EU is rediscovering this the hard way.
Graffur 6y ago
The EU has been beyond useless during the whole covid-19 pandemic. I find it pretty disappointing since with quicker action and common rules we could be in a much better place right now. I think it is silly that EU citizens are dying and/or locked down because of money and/or contracts.
- baq 6y ago
  It’s been useless because it doesn’t have governance over pandemic response. It’s up to the member states. Member states have been mostly useless, yes.
  - thitcanh 6y ago
    With the exception of the newly-departed UK, has there been any EU state(s) that performed consistently better than others? The UK is doing better with vaccines, but yeah, it didn't do any better during the pandemic.
    - ArkanExplorer 6y ago
      Yes, Sweden - which remained basically open for business, with only some closures to senior schools, no masks, no hospital overloading, and no lockdowns. Sweden has a lower per-capita COVID deathtoll than Czechia, Belgium, Slovenia, UK, Hungary, Bosnia, Italy, Bulgaria, Moldova, Macedonia, Slovakia, USA, Portgual, Spain, Croatia, France, Poland. Its 2020 deaths were only 5.75% higher than its 2018 deaths: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... And even then can mainly be explained by a weak 2019 flu season (with deaths in 2019 3.6% below 2018) and potentially lower deaths in 2021 due to mortality displacement. By contrast, Germany, with extensive and rolling lockdowns, had deaths 3.2% higher than 2018: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Sterbefaelle-Lebenserwartung/Tabellen/sonderauswertung-sterbefaelle.html?nn=23768 https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel... So a superficial analysis would suggest that society-wide lockdowns could have saved a country like Sweden 2.55% of deaths, or 2,486 people. So you would be locking down 4,115 people in order to save one of them from dying of COVID, beyond what could be achieved from softer or voluntary measures.
idownvoted 6y ago
No one to blame but Angela Merkel who personally pushed other EU member states into delegating authority on the issue to the EMA even overruling her own minister of health. Needless to say that the EU – the hotbed of excess politicians who've been "early reitred" by their domestic parties into Brussles/Strasbourg – isn't surprising anyone with failing so hard on the vaccine issue. Failing on so many levels: From the fine-print of contracts (e.g. with AZ) to the big scale disinformation campaigns (by Euractiv and domestic media outlets) spurring Anti-British sentiments (e.g. good old nationalistic hate, up-cycled for the upper-class). What we are witnessing is compound incompetence, which upon fear being detected hastingly looks for an escape goat.
- throwawinsider 6y ago
  That's very accurate indeed. Brussels is where careers go to die. We have the knowledge, network, expertise of 27 national governments and suddenly it's pushed aside by the ideological priorities of Merkel and European Commission. Result, continuous contradictions, delays, misguided and impossible initiatives, and the population of the 27 countries will spend a few more months locked down as there are no vaccines.
- chki 6y ago
  There are a lot of things not true in your comment; I will point out a few things: The EMA did not get any additional power delegated to it by Merkel or anybody else. Maybe you are talking about the joint vaccine procurement by the European Commission? An instrument that does actually allow EU member states to purchase additional vaccines. If you are talking about EMA: the EMA does not even disallow countries from using other vaccines not approved by the EMA (Hungary is using Sputnik V for example). The EU is not a "hotbed of excess politicians who've been "early retired"". That might have been true on some level in the past but everybody has realized for quite some time that the EU has real powers and people want those jobs. There are many young MEPs and very competent members of the European Commission. We are not witnessing incompetence: Vaccine production is very difficult and the EU is not running a nationalistic scheme like the US or the UK who are not exporting any vaccines whatsoever. In four-five months most adult people in the EU will have the chance to be vaccinated. That's an enormous success story. Other developed countries don't have any significant amount of vaccines at all. All western countries with vaccines (except for US and UK) only have them because of the EU.
vdddv 6y ago
It's easy to miss how far we are on a global scale. 3.4% World 1.5% Asia 0.42% Africa 15% N. America 10% Europe 4.8% S. America 0.44% Oceania https://twitter.com/CoVacProgress https://twitter.com/CoVacProgress
Aeolun 6y ago
Oh, and here I sit in my lovely Japan with 1 out of 1300 people having had their first dose. You don’t know how good you have it.
jopsen 6y ago
Considering all the things the EU could have done better, what is the negative outcome here.. 2-4 months delay? In a year will we still be talking about the vaccine shortness? I'm thinking no. So yeah, the EU could use dirty tricks like export bans. But do we really need to? At the end of the day, it matters if vaccination picks up before the next flue season. For the reminder of this one, we all have to rely on social distancing.
perryizgr8 6y ago
This could be considered as a point for greater autonomy, thus favoring brexit. The EU is a much larger government, hence much more inefficient and with much more capacity for incompetence and corruption. In times of crisis, EU nations are dependant on this large bureaucracy, whereas UK can forge ahead and quickly get the people what they need. In this case that's the vaccine.
DrNosferatu 6y ago
This: The EU should start to invoke the Doha Declaration[1] (patent release), and use it in full, if necessary. This would pressure AstraZeneca to fulfill the contracts they signed and already got payed for. It is irrelevant that other customers signed first / paid more / whatever. They signed a contract, and they did not deliver - there must be consequences. (not childish, passive-aggressive, vaccine clot-danger rumors/whining) If they cannot deliver their production commitments, then the EU should open the patents and procure the production elsewhere, in AZ's place. (for example, Bayer's vaccine production capacity is unused) The US did it - the nice way - with J&J and Merck. EU bureaucrats need to adult-up, (and put aside neoliberal dogma / possible private sector careers) and act proactively for Citizen's (health and economic) needs. The more days people are without vaccination, the more will needlessly die. And further will the economy / livelihoods plummet. I also see no problem that the EU continues production beyond its own direct requirements, and supplies those in the World that need vaccines and cannot afford them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doha_Declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doha_Declaration
- niij 6y ago
  If they did what you propose do you think it would incentivise or disincentivise companies on the future to produce medicines in that country? It seems clear to me that a company would move out if they spent millions+ researching a vaccine only to have the government nationalize (i.e. steal) the patent. Good for regular citizens in the short term, but seriously damaging in the long term.
  - libertine 6y ago
    This is another one of those comments that keep popping up... it's not by random chance that the majority of vaccine producers are established in Europe. This type of operations aren't simple assembly lines that can be moved around, there's a lot of incentives to be in Europe, and this has been built up in decades. No company would move out, they like Europe, a lot. There's a lot of qualified professionals, good infrastructure, and most likely good incentives to be there. What you're seeing is the reaction to a company borderline criminal actions. They overlapped contracts, they are choosing what contracts to break and which ones to not break, they are delaying processes that are compromising deliveries, and they keep trying to move products while failing to deliver their contractual obligations. It's like they are stretching the "best reasonable efforts" to the maximum.
GiorgioG 6y ago
What we're witnessing is simply normal human behavior. We take care of our tribe before helping anyone else. AZ is HQ'd in England IIRC and Pfizer, Moderna are US-based companies. Of course the governments are going to 'negotiate' to have their needs met before allowing exports. If the tables were turned the EU would do the same (as I would expect them to.)
- the_why_of_y 6y ago
  Pfizer didn't develop the vaccine, BioNTech did, in the EU, with funding from Germany. The EU has allowed BioNTech to export 40 million doses so far.
benja123 6y ago
I can give my perspective as someone who was born in Canada but spent most of my adult life in Israel. Currently my parents are in Canada, both in their 70s and still have no idea when the vaccine will be available to them whereas I am in Israel in my late 30s and I had my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine over a month ago. The difference between the countries is startling. Yes Israel paid more money for the vaccine and agreed to share anonymized information with Pfizer. The math checked out (cost of closure vs vaccine) so it made sense. The fact that some countries focused on price negotiation vs mass vaccinations astounds me as each day a country is in lockdown costs billions of dollars. But I am not going to focus on that aspect. What I am going to talk about is how Canada and Israel managed the crisis. In Israel the general trend is to not really overthink things. This is perfect when there is a crisis and decisions need to be made fast. For instance when the virus started Israel was one of the first countries, outside of Italy and China, to implement a strict closure. Another habit Israelis have is to bend or flat out break the rules as they are in general very skeptical of anything the government does. This can also be important during the handling of a crisis, as some rules can get in the way of finding a solution faster. But this also has a downside. For instance after a few weeks of closure in which very few people died, a large chunk of Israelis started to ignore the closure rules. Canada on the other hand was very slow to implement a closure but when they did the population was quick to listen and from my understanding continue to follow the rules the government set a year later. Now to the vaccine program, when it became clear that Israel bet on the wrong vaccine, the PM called the CEO of Pfizer 30 times and agreed to pay way more just to get the vaccine faster. Our government, which is normally very slow to move, was able to arrange the funding for this within a few days. When the vaccine arrived in Israel - the government with the healthcare companies (Israel has public healthcare, but it is managed by 4 private companies) implemented a plan within days to distribute the vaccine to the entire population. The plan was intentionally simple with a very simple criteria of who is eligible and who is not (over this age - yes, under this age - no, healthcare worker - yes, at risk - yes). There was also some innovation in that they were the first country to repackage the vaccines so they could be distributed in smaller amounts to places like nursing homes or small communities (this entire process had to be done in a freezer). Remember when I said Israelis break the rules? Well an interesting thing started to happen. At the end day, if there were vaccines that would need to be thrown out, nurses took it upon themself to give leftover vaccines to whoever would take it. They didn’t wait or ask for permission they just did what needed to be done. There were even reports of nurses walking out and pulling people off of sidewalks to come and get vaccinated. This of course didn’t last very long. Within days there were Facebook groups, not managed by any official organization, but by individual Israelis, that were publishing the location of clinics with leftover doses that need to be used by days end. Now the entire country was mobilized as part of the vaccine effort and this meant that very few doses were wasted. You see in Israel, they treated the vaccine effort like a war and that meant mobilizing the population, a clear goal, fast decision making and accepting that the one in the field (the doctors and nurses) have some freedom to make decisions that will lead to the goals being achieved. I don’t think this was a conscious choice, it’s just part of the countries DNA. Contrast to Canada - when they got the vaccine, it sat in freezers while they discussed who would get it first. They didn’t focus on mass distribution and instead focused on making the most correct decision (which of course leads to no decision). It was compounded by the fact that each province created their own distribution plan, often based on a long complex set of criteria. Now maybe it did happen, but I don’t see it being nearly as likely that a nurse in Canada would take it upon him or herself to distribute the vaccine to those that don’t fit the official criteria, even if it meant throwing out vaccines at the end of the day. Canada didn’t take a war footing when it came to the vaccine distribution program. Now let me make something clear - a lot of the things that made the vaccine program a success here, are also the things that cause the biggest headaches during normal times and a lot of the things that made it a relative failure in Canada are what make Canada great (over planning vs under planning for instance). Had the vaccine taken another year, I think Canada would have ended up in a much better position than Israel did. I suspect the EU is much more like Canada and possibly even worse. My impression of the EU these days is that they do not take problems seriously until it’s too late. The writing is always on the wall, but they are very slow to move. There are a lot of good things about the EU too. But in a real crisis I want to be somewhere that knows how to make quick decisions.

239 points by undefined1 6y ago

CTRL-F bureaucracy Cue HN complaining how much "bureaucracy" and how much "red tape" the EU has, and smth smth socialism.

CodeGlitch 6y ago
But that is the problem here isn't it? Why else would the EU be 3 months behind the UK.
- dundarious 6y ago
  No that's probably not the problem, if this (plausible) thread is accurate: https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1372897635577761803 https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1372897635577761803 Edit: I'm not sure I buy the proposed argument that in a way, "the EU believed in the free market and fair play too much, and the US and UK betrayed those noble ideals", but I do believe the EU failed to recognize and/or counter the state of play, that the US and UK had legislated production partners and output to stay within national borders.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    I think the EU even today is still boasting about how they saved a few euros on the vaccines. Such an great deal, when someone else pays for the consequences.
- the_why_of_y 6y ago
  The EU appears to be of the opinion that it needs to net export 8 million vaccine doses a month to the UK (plus 17 million to other countries, although the article doesn't detail if any doses are imported from those countries). https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/eu-exported-more-than-8-million-vaccines-to-uk-in-february-1.4506764 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/eu-exported-mor...
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  There are two issues: UK and US nationalism preventing companies to shift finished products to the EU in case of production troubles, while the EU has been slow to impose restrictions in the other ways. This meant that when the AZ plant in Belgium got production problems the EU had to take the shortfall alone instead of it being distributed on all customers: the upshot of this is that UK has simply gotten more vaccines than the EU. The second problem is largely national: some countries have been slow to use the severely reduced deliveries they have gotten (possibly because their schedules were screwed up by the shortfall). The national governments have been really happy to pretend the national programs are perfect and there aren't large stockpiles of unused vaccines in their countries, and to blame all the tardiness on the shortfall "from the EU".
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    Nationalism? The Astrazeneca vaccines was paid for by the UK 3 months before the EU. Not 3 weeks, 3 months. The same production problems with the EU batch happened to the UK one, as far as I know, but they had time to fix it because of those extra 3 months. Now the EU want to jump the queue and give it out "evenly", because it suits them. And if the shoe was on the other foot, they'd be saying 'je suis desolé, we have no vaccine for you British because of Brexit'. And you know it. Plus they've been talking down the British strategy so much now their own citizens are wasting what Astrazeneca supplies they do have, so it'd be a complete waste.

polytely 6y ago

I really wish this graph included individual EU countries because the vaccination strategy is specific per country

generaljelly 6y ago
I agree. I would love to know the specifics of any country in detail. Or a least a deeper understanding of medicine distribution in the EU. Any chance someome can explain and talk about it?
buster 6y ago
I think the EU is ordering and distributing the vaccines for the member states in order to do it even and fair (not sure how this works out in reality, though).
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  They coordinate purchases and deliveries at a national level only. It's a very long way down from a truck leaving the factory destined towards a country and someone getting stabbed in the arm by a professional, and all of that work is on the national agencies.
pacificmint 6y ago
A lot of the European countries are all at a similiar point, most likely cause the vaccines were procured together. Spain, Italy, France and Germany are virtually identical, on a per capita basis. Hungary is a little ahead, as they are also using the Russian vaccine. But still behind the US.
- FpUser 6y ago
  Italian company Adienne Pharma & Biotech has signed the deal to produce Russian vaccine domestically. They are waiting however for the approval of said vaccine by the EU.
blibble 6y ago
the only countries doing well are those that have stepped outside of the EU commission's bungled programme

bayareabadboy 6y ago

Is Britain doing better than EU? I know nothing but that seems like an easy comparison, right?

toyg 6y ago
A better comparison is with US, China, or Russia. And yes, it doesn't look very good. The rollout has been slow for a number of reasons, from actual resistance in some countries to the well-publicised shenanigans with manufacturers. Also, Europeans export a significant portion of their vaccine production, unlike others.
philjohn 6y ago
Well, the UK is prioritising getting as many people a first dose as possible, so the number "fully" vaccinated in the UK lags behind the EU. Jury is still somewhat out about which method is better, and who will finish first. I'd put money on both reaching 70% of eligible people vaccinated with both doses around the same time.
- toyg 6y ago
  It's even more complex than that, since some countries have now switched to UK-like intervals between doses (11 weeks)... but not all. And there are a bunch of country-specific issues too. This is one of those situations where "EU" as a concept is a bit of an overgeneralization for 27 loosely-coordinating countries.
- jariel 6y ago
  Yes, but the UK is so far ahead with jabs/person that it's going to make a the bigger difference. The volume of jabs will dictate the outcome more than the 1-now-1-much-later or 1-now-1-soon strategies.
dragontamer 6y ago
Britain is one of the fastest vaccinating countries in the world. Maybe THE fastest (they're over 50% adults vaccinated already), ignoring smaller countries like Israel who don't have to worry about scale quite as msuch. Britain erred on the side of faster rollout: many countries criticize them for rushing AZ's vaccine approval process actually. Because Britain somewhat rushed the vaccine rollout, its probably not a fair comparison to other countries. USA vs EU is probably a better comparison (but maybe not, because USA has a *dominating* industrial base and can physically make more things than most other countries)

odiroot 6y ago

Well, Hungary is in EU and they seem to be doing much better than the rest.

raverbashing 6y ago
They are going with Chinese and Russian vaccines (and for a 10Mi country a small number will bump the per capita numbers nicely) Not a bad strategy but it doesn't scale (especially for the Sputnik V current production capability)
yosito 6y ago
Hungary decided to bypass EU regulators and approve several vaccines that aren't approved in the EU, as well as procure them with their own deals.
- the-dude 6y ago
  There is no need to bypass the EU regulators as each EU country has its own regulatory body which has national authority. The EU is a trade-bloc, full stop. The EMA is there to make it easier for pharma.
  - bhelkey 6y ago
    > The EMA is there to make it easier for pharma The highest vaccination rate of any EU country is Hungry with about half of the US's rate which in turn is a bit behind the UK[1]. In light of this, I am curious how you see EMA making it easier for pharma. Is there an underlying issue that I a missing? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1194939/rate-covid-vaccination-by-county-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1194939/rate-covid-vacci...
- the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
  You don't need to bypass regulators, all countries can approve it themselves. That's also how the UK approved their vaccines before the Brexit deal took effect.
6y ago

config_yml 6y ago

In Switzerland it's the same. In my state/canton they don't even have enough vaccine for the high risk group of 240k people.

garbaty_ciul 6y ago
This is exceptionally sad due to the country being 1) rich 2) with small population (comparable to Israel) 3) big in pharma industry Yet from what i see the public discourse is most concerned about opening up restaurant terraces, etc. and not the immense economical damage that having late vaccination campaign will inflict.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nairboon 6y ago
  What can you expect from an exceptionally incompetent government. Today the Johnson vaccine was approved by the Swiss "FDA", but the government actually forgot to this day to order any doses of that vaccine... Instead they ordered Novavax & Curevac which didn't even apply for approval in Switzerland.

raverbashing 6y ago

"Severely lags behind" well, only if we're considering the top performers Countries that are ahead of the EU (on avg.) per person doses are mostly small (Israel, UAE, Chile). Comparable are the UK, US and China In terms of actual doses the EU is behind the US and maybe China (debatable numbers). The rest are behind https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=425..latest&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=population&Metric=Vaccinations&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=false&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~ISR~GBR~ARE~EuropeanUnion~BRA~CHN~IDN~BGD~RUS~MEX~CHL~European+Union https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

2trill2spill 6y ago
According to the Bloomberg tracker[1] the United states has given 24.9% of the population at least one shot and 13.5% two shots. The EU has given 8.7% one dose and 3.8% two doses. The United States is administrating 2.5 million doses a day and the EU is administrating 1.1 million doses a day, although the EU has a larger population. Also the rate of vaccines administered in the EU is down from 1.5 million a day from the prior week, while the US rate is going up. So severely behind seems about right. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
- raverbashing 6y ago
  "Severely behind" the country doing the most vaccinations per day, but not on a general comparison. (Though yes last week the amount given was lower) I completely agree the EU could be doing a better job, but in terms of general comparison, it's not doing bad (It's doing better than Canada/Australia/Japan) for example.
  - thehappypm 6y ago
    No, it's doing bad. Canada should, by all means, be doing much worse than the EU, being a politically low-power country. Being roughly the same as the EU is bad. Australia basically has eradicated covid. Japan has the pandemic largely under control as well. The EU, for all its socialism and condescension of the US, should by all means be clobbering the US. But it's getting clobbered.

vrepsys 6y ago

The EU has failed to secure contracts ensuring the EU produced vaccine stays in the EU[1]. So far the EU has exported 41.6 million doses of the vaccine (the largest importer being the UK)[2]. Both the US and the UK have exported 0 vaccines. [1] https://twitter.com/davekeating/status/1372897635577761803 https://twitter.com/davekeating/status/1372897635577761803 [2] https://twitter.com/AlexTaylorNews/status/1373621472607010817 https://twitter.com/AlexTaylorNews/status/137362147260701081...

dundarious 6y ago
AFAIK you are correct except perhaps that US and UK have exported 0 vaccines, though the number is probably quite small relatively speaking, and certainly smaller than the EU (foolishly) expected.
FranzFerdiNaN 6y ago
This os the EU being a good ally. The expectation was that the UK and US would also help by exporting part of their production, which was indeed dumb. The US also didnt secure such contracts, they simply forbid any export. The UK is helped by AZ not sending anything produced in the UK to the EU, despite the EU contract stipulating that doses would also come from the UK.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Not just that; quite a lot of EU AZ production goes to the UK, too.
  - koyote 6y ago
    Do you have a source on that? I was under impression that the UK manufactures their entire AZ stock and the only vaccine produced in the EU for the UK is Pfizer/BioNTech
    - kuschku 6y ago
      70% of the doses the EU bought were instead delivered to the UK to fulfill AZ's obligation to the UK. After that initial batch, a further 8 million EU doses were exported to the UK, and a further 46 million EU doses were exported to other countries, including the US. Just this second batch would have tripled the EU's vaccination rate so far.

jiripospisil 6y ago

You can see some statistics for the Czech Republic (population is about 10.7 million) at [0]. Vykázaná očkování celkem = Administered total Vykázaná očkování za včera = Administered in the previous day Osoby s ukončeným očkováním (dvě dávky) celkem = People with complete vaccination (two shots) total Osoby s ukončeným očkováním celkem za včera = People with complete vaccination in the previous day [0] https://onemocneni-aktualne.mzcr.cz/vakcinace-cr https://onemocneni-aktualne.mzcr.cz/vakcinace-cr

isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
Poland has this: https://www.gov.pl/web/szczepimysie/raport-szczepien-przeciwko-covid-19 https://www.gov.pl/web/szczepimysie/raport-szczepien-przeciw... Liczba szczepień 1 dawką = first doses administered Liczba szczepień 2 dawką = second doses administered Liczba dawek dostarczonych do Polski = doses delivered from suppliers Liczba dawek dostarczonych do punktów = doses delivered to vaccination points Zamówienia w trakcie realizacji = doses assigned to a vaccination point, but not yet administered Stan magazynu = warehouse stock, unclear if this is for second doses (methodology changed last week) Keep in mind that we typically get vaccines on Monday and vaccinate throughout the week - yesterday there were ~5k available doses in the whole of Poland
MayeulC 6y ago
To keep with the thread. France (67M): https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/suivi-vaccination?location=FRA https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/suivi-vaccination?loc... premières doses = first doses (6.1M) rendez-vous prévus cette semaine = appointments this week (0.5M) There is a second tab dedicated to logistics: https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/logistique-vaccins?location=FRA https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/logistique-vaccins?lo... That makes it about 10M delivered to date. Vaccination is primarily supply-restricted, only the elderly (75+, or 50+ with preconditions), and medical/strategic personnel (inc firefighters) can get vaccinated for now. At current pace (last two weeks), it would take ~10 months to get 80% vaccinated with one dose... :/

phtrivier 6y ago

Headline could have read : "player that manufacture, use and export resource lags behind players that manufacture, use, and don't export resource". A terrible twitter threat summarized this as "UE played expecting fair play. This now looks naive." https://mobile.twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1372897635577761803 https://mobile.twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/13728976355777... I love bitching at my government like every one else, but it can't see what logistics you can improve to vaccinate more people when you don't exactly have vaccines. Oh, and great play by FB to make sure no one below 30 in europe wants a vaccine, you played well for team USA on this one ! I suppose this will serve as a "never again" shock for bringing back some factories in the EU. Or it will simply serve as a stepping stone for nationalist who will just make things a tad worse, before it (maybe) (one hopes) (who knows ?) gets better.

strictnein 6y ago
Always like when Twitter threads that are supposed to be sources of "truth" says stuff like this: > "Meanwhile in March 2020, President Trump tried unsuccessfully to steal BioNTech from Germany" They tried to buy the company. Not sure when "Buy" became "Steal" > "Trump seemed to be in no hurry to sign Pfizer purchase contracts. " He then links to an article about how they weren't rushing to buy additional vaccines on top of the 100 million already purchased. So, again, highly misleading. Not buying additional vaccines just became "in no hurry to sign Pfizer purchase contracts"

jariel 6y ago

Here are national breakdowns: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Aardwolf 6y ago
I wish this website would allow having a link to an individual country, every time you refresh you have to deselect all default countries again and add the country you're interested in again
- _Microft 6y ago
  You can link to a graph with a particular selection of countries directly. There is a symbol with connected dots in the bottom right corner of the graph that allows to copy a link to it as it is shown. Example: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=346..latest&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=population&Metric=Vaccinations&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

gaha 6y ago

The EU has exported 41 millionen vaccine doses of which the UK has gotten 8 million so far [1]. Meanwhile, the UK and US do not export any vaccines at all. So just as a back of the envelope calculation, with 41 millionen doeses the EU could have vaccinated an additional 10% of its population, while the UK would have had more than 10% less vaccinatetions without those 8 million. This would not completetly close the gap, but the numbers would be quite different then. Anyway, you can interpret this in a postivie way: the EU is trying to be good and is sharing its vaccinations more or less fairly with other countries (for now). However, you can also see it as the EU has no real power at all and is just an easy target to get fooled over by other countries.. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-eu-not-ready-to-share-covid-vaccines-with-poorer-countries/a-56944274 https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-eu-not-ready-to-share-covi...

xiphias2 6y ago
I'm not sure that I would call the number of Pfitzer/BioNTech vaccines exported to young people in Israel fair so that they can party, while my parents inside the EU are waiting locked in for half a year now because they are scared of dying (and some of their friends already dead from COVID :( )
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  The EU decided to spend 750 billion euro of money it does not have (on credit - see [0]) for post-Covid recovery, but at the same time decided to save as much as possible on vaccines. I think that 'penny wise, pound foolish' applies. It would be unfair to Israel if they paid extra surcharge for their vaccines and later were told by European authorities "sorry, we will confiscate them, bad luck." If we instead paid some 10 extra euro per dose, it would have added up to about 1 per cent of the planned recovery fund - and an extra factory or two could have been built during last autumn to start cranking out the vaccines by millions as soon as approved. [0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-agrees-on-750-billion-euro-recovery-fund/av-54252633 https://www.dw.com/en/eu-agrees-on-750-billion-euro-recovery...
  - ThalesX 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Recent and related: Europe's Vaccine Disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964197 - Jan 2021 (418 comments) I think there have been other threads as well?

svara 6y ago

This is the wrong thing to complain about. At this point vaccine distribution is a zero-sum game. You might just as well frame it as "EU refrains from pushing itself to the front of the line". This thing isn't over before vaccine availability isn't production-limited anymore. The real mistake that the EU made was to not realize early on that vaccine production was going to be a huge issue in 2021, and make fixing that a priority.

markus92 6y ago
From a public health perspective, it's not zero sum. One country fully vaccinated and another equally sized country not vaccinated, leads to higher strain on the healthcare system than both countries 50% vaccinated. Pareto principle applies to hospitalizations.
scrollaway 6y ago
Very untrue. COVID being much, much higher-risk in top age brackets means vaccinating the top age brackets everywhere first is a lot more beneficial than vaccinating country-by-country. Same reason why your country (whichever it is) likely made priority groups for vaccine distribution rather than make it a free-for-all. And the first 15-20% or so of vaccines administered are CRITICAL. In true pareto principle, 80% of hospitalizations come from 20% of the population. I'm in Belgium. We are facing a third wave. We're going back into lockdown pretty soon (it's almost certain). With just 400k more vaccines administered, we would not be in this mess. 400k. The US vaccinates 3 million every day.
- svara 6y ago
  The EU has received enough vaccine for everyone over 70-something. But it doesn't change anything about whether there's a third wave or not. If you chose not to do a lockdown in the third wave because "older people are already vaccinated" that would just mean that your hospitals would fill up with younger people instead, since total number infected would be much higher than ever before.
  - scrollaway 6y ago

standardUser 6y ago

Most of Europe was much slower to approve vaccines than the US and UK. Because of that, I've assumed since the first approvals in December that Europe would lag. Once the US, UK and others said "hey, we're ready to buy all the vaccines, send us what you'e got", what did we expect would happen? I don't know why Europe lagged on the approvals, but it seems obvious that would also lead to a lag in rollout.

dundarious 6y ago
I find the information in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544947 credible, and they indicate that approval is not the major issue. Instead, the EU's contracts with the pharma companies cannot be met, because the US and UK legislated/contracted to bind local production to local use, with the UK even specifically requiring/strongly encouraging Oxford to use a UK pharma company (instead of a US one) in order to ensure they could bind local production to local use.
- manmal 6y ago
  Exactly. We in the EU are supply limited. In Austria, the first Pfizer shot was given before Christmas, and we are still at only 4% fully immunized (12% got at least one shot). We are even continuing to vaccinate while other countries have stopped AZ because of the recently reported potential issues - still doesn’t move the needle much.
derriz 6y ago
The FDA has yet to approve AstraZeneca's vaccine while the EU approved it back in January. The US has a stockpile of 40million doses which are not being used until approval arrives while European vaccination rates are limited by vaccine supply. Approval speed has nothing to do with it.
- tabtab 6y ago
  The US should allow AstraZeneca to be used on volunteers in other nations, as long as it's not under coercion. The possible blot-clot issue is small, if any. Thus, volunteers is a decent compromise, rather than let it sit in storage.

VBprogrammer 6y ago

My partner, who is 32 with only minor underlying health issues, received her first jab yesterday. I'm obviously pleased that she will shortly have some degree of protection both for her sake and for our daughter and I, since my partner is the only one who has to leave the house for work. However, at the same time, I can't help feel that we've jumped the queue slightly. The EU is experiencing another wave which will doubtlessly culminate in thousands of deaths, the majority will be from people older or with much more serious health complications than my partner. I'm kinda sick of reading these debates about who ordered what and when under what conditions. There is a complete lack of compassion, we should be doing what we can to help those countries who still have older people unvaccinated. We can wait another couple of months before our holidays to Blackpool and Stalyvegas.

joelbluminator 6y ago
So why help the EU - why should they jump the queue before Africa or India or China?
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  I'm not sure what part of what I said you've misread as only helping the EU. For the avoidance of doubt, I think we should act with compassion, trying to save lives regardless of the place those people were born in.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    I agree with that, but the UK was one of the first countries to stump up cash and start developing a vaccine before it'd even got bad in the UK. That's basically the reason, it was part of the contract that we get first dibs if fund it. I don't think EU countries putting out bad press about the AstraZenica vaccine is doing them any favors either - it's the company they're in negotiations with! Not saying what's fair or isn't here but that's the reality.
secondcoming 6y ago
> We can wait another couple of months before our holidays to Blackpool and Stalyvegas Speak for yourself. I'm not being glib. Compassion is wearing thin. There are anti-lockdown protests all over the UK and EU. There is a limit to how much more the ordinary citizen can endure. If that means that some people have to risk death then perhaps, as awful as it sounds, that may be for the best. They're the ones who should stay at home. And yes, I do have elderly relatives who are at risk.

tablespoon 6y ago

The free market saves the day again! https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/world/europe/europe-vaccine-rollout-astrazeneca.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/world/europe/europe-vacci... > While Washington went into business with the drug companies, Europe was more fiscally conservative and trusted the free market.

BurningFrog 6y ago

I'll just note that without any factories of their own, Israel managed to get more vaccines than any other country. As I understand it, because they were ready to pay whatever it costs. Which, if you look at the numbers, is not much at all.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
The UAE is also up to 80%. Having a population of 8M helps a lot. If Israel (or the UAE) had a population of 350M - they would not be even close to 100% vaccinated.
- atilaneves 6y ago
  Switzerland has a population of 8.6M, isn't part of the EU, and yet... The problem there has been getting enough doses delivered.
Voloskaya 6y ago
> As I understand it, because they were ready to pay whatever it costs. That particular cost wasn't financial though. It was a promise to fast track rollout where other countries wanted to go through lengthy approval and review processes (I am not saying lengthy == bad in that case), vaccinate their population as fast as possible and share data about efficacy with the manufacturers. The Israeali government was ready to take risks that many other countries weren't.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Interesting! I didn't know that! I found an article confirming this. Though it also says > "Israel paid about $30 per dose, almost double what other nations did" I'm always shocked by how little money that is. $3000 per dose would be cheap!!! https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/01/05/the-secret-sauce-behind-israels-successful-covid-19-vaccination-program/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/01/05/the-secre...
  - 6y ago

Mvandenbergh 6y ago

Behind whom? I mean, I get it, my own country is doing badly even compared to other EU countries but we need to keep in mind that the EU is at 10% or so vaccinated which is a lot more than almost any other major country or political bloc. If you show only the UK and US as comparators, it looks really bad but that's a hard comparison set to go up against. It's actually really ironic that the the UK and US took an approach that most people would consider a very European one by directly involving themselves and investing up-front in vaccine production while the European Commission took the neoliberal route of placing commercial orders in most cases and doing some but much less direct investment. What has ended up happening is basically the confluence of suboptimal but not necessarily bad decision making and some really bad luck. The EU, UK, and US all bought large portfolios of vaccines, enough a few times over if they all worked. They also all invested up-front in R&D, the EU proportionally less per head of population but of course many EU countries are not so rich and do not have so much domestic biotech/pharma so this has to be seen in that context as well. The EU is not all France/Benelux/Germany which do have such industries. All three gambled that their portfolios would pay off. US went heavy on J&J, Pfizer/Biontech, Moderna (not as sure about the US portfolio but loads of others) UK went for AZ, Valneva, GSK/Sanofi, Novavax, Pfizer/Biontech, (and later bought some Moderna but not much and only after it was approved). There is some kind of future agreement with CureVac which was only recently concluded. EU went for Pfizer-Biontech, AZ, J&J GSK/Sanofi, CureVac, Moderna. I think there have been discussions with Novavax and Valneva but no concrete orders. (UK and EU have the vaccines roughly in order of order size) So what happened? Essentially the Pfizer vaccine worked brilliantly and they seem to have gotten their scale-up working quite well. Good for EU and UK both. AZ works well (probably slightly less well, and with quite a lot of evidence that the decision not to use the stabilised fusion protein is what is making a difference to performance against certain variants) but AZ is having an absolute nightmare getting their yields up. This has affected all their global production - they had intended to delivery 30m doses to the UK by September... 2020 and 100m by the end of the year and clearly have not been able to. Making biological products is really hard, clearly. This has slowed down both the UK and EU roll-outs but because the UK scale-up started earlier (note my comments above about investment agreements, they started production scaling at their Oxford site as early as April 2020) they are further in the production ramp and of course most of the UK delay was before the vaccine was approved. So despite their UK order technically being later than their EU order, it has been felt much harder in the EU because the "lateness" of the UK order mostly happened before the vaccine (or any other vaccine) was approved. The GSK/Sanofi vaccine has been postponed and may never see the light of day. Novavax has had good results and is currently preparing for the approval process. Both the UK and EU had hoped to use either AZ or GSK/Sanofi as their "workhorse" vaccine but the UK had slightly less emphasis on it and bought / invested in more doses of vaccine per head. The EU has not done a great job here but it's also not abject failure, they've just had some bad luck in that simultaneously their two biggest orders were cancelled and slowed down. It could easily have been the case that a different set of vaccines didn't work and/or were hard to make and then it might be the US or the UK with the problem. I think before we draw big picture conclusions (apart from Ursula vdL being useless, but I think any German who remembered how good she was at defence procurement could have told you that) we need to remember that to some extent there are historical contingencies at play here and we can end up over-fitting by assuming that literally every difference we see is due to structural problems/advantages faced by one side or another.

dependsontheq 6y ago

Well it’s all just hindsight - depending on which vaccines are approved first different countries would have one this race. The EU is a bit of a nicer player internationally in general because the only thing holding it together are the common market rules so it is very rules focused. I think talking about winning or failed vaccination campaigns might be a bit early.

klelatti 6y ago

Leaving aside the politics is anyone surprised that roll-out has been slower when organised (to a material extent) by a multinational organisation whose normal modus operandi is to build consensus amongst its members even if this takes time (I've experienced it at first hand). Contrast this with the UK which has a very centralised governance model and a centralised single payer health system. Not being critical of or praising either model or behaviour in either case. Just not surprising that this happens when the challenge is to deliver on a clear objective as rapidly as possible. (And still disappointing that EU citizens have to deal with the results of this).

groos 6y ago

People have friends but nations have interests. Looks like the EU is rediscovering this the hard way.

Graffur 6y ago

The EU has been beyond useless during the whole covid-19 pandemic. I find it pretty disappointing since with quicker action and common rules we could be in a much better place right now. I think it is silly that EU citizens are dying and/or locked down because of money and/or contracts.

baq 6y ago
It’s been useless because it doesn’t have governance over pandemic response. It’s up to the member states. Member states have been mostly useless, yes.
- thitcanh 6y ago
  With the exception of the newly-departed UK, has there been any EU state(s) that performed consistently better than others? The UK is doing better with vaccines, but yeah, it didn't do any better during the pandemic.
  - ArkanExplorer 6y ago
    Yes, Sweden - which remained basically open for business, with only some closures to senior schools, no masks, no hospital overloading, and no lockdowns. Sweden has a lower per-capita COVID deathtoll than Czechia, Belgium, Slovenia, UK, Hungary, Bosnia, Italy, Bulgaria, Moldova, Macedonia, Slovakia, USA, Portgual, Spain, Croatia, France, Poland. Its 2020 deaths were only 5.75% higher than its 2018 deaths: https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... And even then can mainly be explained by a weak 2019 flu season (with deaths in 2019 3.6% below 2018) and potentially lower deaths in 2021 due to mortality displacement. By contrast, Germany, with extensive and rolling lockdowns, had deaths 3.2% higher than 2018: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Sterbefaelle-Lebenserwartung/Tabellen/sonderauswertung-sterbefaelle.html?nn=23768 https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel... So a superficial analysis would suggest that society-wide lockdowns could have saved a country like Sweden 2.55% of deaths, or 2,486 people. So you would be locking down 4,115 people in order to save one of them from dying of COVID, beyond what could be achieved from softer or voluntary measures.

idownvoted 6y ago

No one to blame but Angela Merkel who personally pushed other EU member states into delegating authority on the issue to the EMA even overruling her own minister of health. Needless to say that the EU – the hotbed of excess politicians who've been "early reitred" by their domestic parties into Brussles/Strasbourg – isn't surprising anyone with failing so hard on the vaccine issue. Failing on so many levels: From the fine-print of contracts (e.g. with AZ) to the big scale disinformation campaigns (by Euractiv and domestic media outlets) spurring Anti-British sentiments (e.g. good old nationalistic hate, up-cycled for the upper-class). What we are witnessing is compound incompetence, which upon fear being detected hastingly looks for an escape goat.

throwawinsider 6y ago
That's very accurate indeed. Brussels is where careers go to die. We have the knowledge, network, expertise of 27 national governments and suddenly it's pushed aside by the ideological priorities of Merkel and European Commission. Result, continuous contradictions, delays, misguided and impossible initiatives, and the population of the 27 countries will spend a few more months locked down as there are no vaccines.
chki 6y ago
There are a lot of things not true in your comment; I will point out a few things: The EMA did not get any additional power delegated to it by Merkel or anybody else. Maybe you are talking about the joint vaccine procurement by the European Commission? An instrument that does actually allow EU member states to purchase additional vaccines. If you are talking about EMA: the EMA does not even disallow countries from using other vaccines not approved by the EMA (Hungary is using Sputnik V for example). The EU is not a "hotbed of excess politicians who've been "early retired"". That might have been true on some level in the past but everybody has realized for quite some time that the EU has real powers and people want those jobs. There are many young MEPs and very competent members of the European Commission. We are not witnessing incompetence: Vaccine production is very difficult and the EU is not running a nationalistic scheme like the US or the UK who are not exporting any vaccines whatsoever. In four-five months most adult people in the EU will have the chance to be vaccinated. That's an enormous success story. Other developed countries don't have any significant amount of vaccines at all. All western countries with vaccines (except for US and UK) only have them because of the EU.

vdddv 6y ago

It's easy to miss how far we are on a global scale. 3.4% World 1.5% Asia 0.42% Africa 15% N. America 10% Europe 4.8% S. America 0.44% Oceania https://twitter.com/CoVacProgress https://twitter.com/CoVacProgress

Aeolun 6y ago

Oh, and here I sit in my lovely Japan with 1 out of 1300 people having had their first dose. You don’t know how good you have it.

jopsen 6y ago

Considering all the things the EU could have done better, what is the negative outcome here.. 2-4 months delay? In a year will we still be talking about the vaccine shortness? I'm thinking no. So yeah, the EU could use dirty tricks like export bans. But do we really need to? At the end of the day, it matters if vaccination picks up before the next flue season. For the reminder of this one, we all have to rely on social distancing.

perryizgr8 6y ago

This could be considered as a point for greater autonomy, thus favoring brexit. The EU is a much larger government, hence much more inefficient and with much more capacity for incompetence and corruption. In times of crisis, EU nations are dependant on this large bureaucracy, whereas UK can forge ahead and quickly get the people what they need. In this case that's the vaccine.

DrNosferatu 6y ago

This: The EU should start to invoke the Doha Declaration[1] (patent release), and use it in full, if necessary. This would pressure AstraZeneca to fulfill the contracts they signed and already got payed for. It is irrelevant that other customers signed first / paid more / whatever. They signed a contract, and they did not deliver - there must be consequences. (not childish, passive-aggressive, vaccine clot-danger rumors/whining) If they cannot deliver their production commitments, then the EU should open the patents and procure the production elsewhere, in AZ's place. (for example, Bayer's vaccine production capacity is unused) The US did it - the nice way - with J&J and Merck. EU bureaucrats need to adult-up, (and put aside neoliberal dogma / possible private sector careers) and act proactively for Citizen's (health and economic) needs. The more days people are without vaccination, the more will needlessly die. And further will the economy / livelihoods plummet. I also see no problem that the EU continues production beyond its own direct requirements, and supplies those in the World that need vaccines and cannot afford them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doha_Declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doha_Declaration

niij 6y ago
If they did what you propose do you think it would incentivise or disincentivise companies on the future to produce medicines in that country? It seems clear to me that a company would move out if they spent millions+ researching a vaccine only to have the government nationalize (i.e. steal) the patent. Good for regular citizens in the short term, but seriously damaging in the long term.
- libertine 6y ago
  This is another one of those comments that keep popping up... it's not by random chance that the majority of vaccine producers are established in Europe. This type of operations aren't simple assembly lines that can be moved around, there's a lot of incentives to be in Europe, and this has been built up in decades. No company would move out, they like Europe, a lot. There's a lot of qualified professionals, good infrastructure, and most likely good incentives to be there. What you're seeing is the reaction to a company borderline criminal actions. They overlapped contracts, they are choosing what contracts to break and which ones to not break, they are delaying processes that are compromising deliveries, and they keep trying to move products while failing to deliver their contractual obligations. It's like they are stretching the "best reasonable efforts" to the maximum.

GiorgioG 6y ago

What we're witnessing is simply normal human behavior. We take care of our tribe before helping anyone else. AZ is HQ'd in England IIRC and Pfizer, Moderna are US-based companies. Of course the governments are going to 'negotiate' to have their needs met before allowing exports. If the tables were turned the EU would do the same (as I would expect them to.)

the_why_of_y 6y ago
Pfizer didn't develop the vaccine, BioNTech did, in the EU, with funding from Germany. The EU has allowed BioNTech to export 40 million doses so far.

benja123 6y ago

I can give my perspective as someone who was born in Canada but spent most of my adult life in Israel. Currently my parents are in Canada, both in their 70s and still have no idea when the vaccine will be available to them whereas I am in Israel in my late 30s and I had my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine over a month ago. The difference between the countries is startling. Yes Israel paid more money for the vaccine and agreed to share anonymized information with Pfizer. The math checked out (cost of closure vs vaccine) so it made sense. The fact that some countries focused on price negotiation vs mass vaccinations astounds me as each day a country is in lockdown costs billions of dollars. But I am not going to focus on that aspect. What I am going to talk about is how Canada and Israel managed the crisis. In Israel the general trend is to not really overthink things. This is perfect when there is a crisis and decisions need to be made fast. For instance when the virus started Israel was one of the first countries, outside of Italy and China, to implement a strict closure. Another habit Israelis have is to bend or flat out break the rules as they are in general very skeptical of anything the government does. This can also be important during the handling of a crisis, as some rules can get in the way of finding a solution faster. But this also has a downside. For instance after a few weeks of closure in which very few people died, a large chunk of Israelis started to ignore the closure rules. Canada on the other hand was very slow to implement a closure but when they did the population was quick to listen and from my understanding continue to follow the rules the government set a year later. Now to the vaccine program, when it became clear that Israel bet on the wrong vaccine, the PM called the CEO of Pfizer 30 times and agreed to pay way more just to get the vaccine faster. Our government, which is normally very slow to move, was able to arrange the funding for this within a few days. When the vaccine arrived in Israel - the government with the healthcare companies (Israel has public healthcare, but it is managed by 4 private companies) implemented a plan within days to distribute the vaccine to the entire population. The plan was intentionally simple with a very simple criteria of who is eligible and who is not (over this age - yes, under this age - no, healthcare worker - yes, at risk - yes). There was also some innovation in that they were the first country to repackage the vaccines so they could be distributed in smaller amounts to places like nursing homes or small communities (this entire process had to be done in a freezer). Remember when I said Israelis break the rules? Well an interesting thing started to happen. At the end day, if there were vaccines that would need to be thrown out, nurses took it upon themself to give leftover vaccines to whoever would take it. They didn’t wait or ask for permission they just did what needed to be done. There were even reports of nurses walking out and pulling people off of sidewalks to come and get vaccinated. This of course didn’t last very long. Within days there were Facebook groups, not managed by any official organization, but by individual Israelis, that were publishing the location of clinics with leftover doses that need to be used by days end. Now the entire country was mobilized as part of the vaccine effort and this meant that very few doses were wasted. You see in Israel, they treated the vaccine effort like a war and that meant mobilizing the population, a clear goal, fast decision making and accepting that the one in the field (the doctors and nurses) have some freedom to make decisions that will lead to the goals being achieved. I don’t think this was a conscious choice, it’s just part of the countries DNA. Contrast to Canada - when they got the vaccine, it sat in freezers while they discussed who would get it first. They didn’t focus on mass distribution and instead focused on making the most correct decision (which of course leads to no decision). It was compounded by the fact that each province created their own distribution plan, often based on a long complex set of criteria. Now maybe it did happen, but I don’t see it being nearly as likely that a nurse in Canada would take it upon him or herself to distribute the vaccine to those that don’t fit the official criteria, even if it meant throwing out vaccines at the end of the day. Canada didn’t take a war footing when it came to the vaccine distribution program. Now let me make something clear - a lot of the things that made the vaccine program a success here, are also the things that cause the biggest headaches during normal times and a lot of the things that made it a relative failure in Canada are what make Canada great (over planning vs under planning for instance). Had the vaccine taken another year, I think Canada would have ended up in a much better position than Israel did. I suspect the EU is much more like Canada and possibly even worse. My impression of the EU these days is that they do not take problems seriously until it’s too late. The writing is always on the wall, but they are very slow to move. There are a lot of good things about the EU too. But in a real crisis I want to be somewhere that knows how to make quick decisions.