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The same issues apply to American control over European power supplies or Norwegian control over European power supplies. They aren't anymore dangerous for Eur

The same issues apply to American control over European power supplies or Norwegian control over European power supplies. They aren't anymore dangerous for Europe. The main difference is our existing trade deals with the US are more embedded into the European economy than any of the other countries. We like the US now, they are our friends, but because they are more connected, we are more reliant on them than others, which is dangerous in and of itself.

BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
Yeah, bring that argument when Norway occupies the Crimean peninsula.
smnrchrds 5y ago
We Canadians felt this deeply when US kept all their domestically-produced vaccine doses for themselves in early 2021. We had grown accustomed to the flow of goods and services between US and Canada being uninterrupted. So for many of us, it was a shock and a disappointment when the US decided to turn off the tap.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't know why this would be so surprising. You're comparing the flow of goods in a stable supply chain with the unprecedented demand for a novel vaccine for which no existing supply chain existed. Of course there wouldn't be a ready flow of vaccine immediately, and of course every country prioritizes its own citizens first and foremost. Now that demand has eased considerably, the US is now donating more doses of vaccine than all of the other countries on the planet combined.
  - adventured 5y ago
    You're being downvoted because you're not allowed to point out on HN that the US is donating more vaccine doses than the rest of the world combined. Just like the US donates as much food to the rest of the world as all other nations combined and has been doing it for a century now. US bad.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      It certainly feels like there's a lot of unjustified pressure on this forum to portray the US as categorically worse than every other country. I have other controversial opinions which are at least met by understandable rebuttals, but this "America doesn't do everything horribly" seems to violate some sacred taboo (and I suspect particularly so with the European and progressive American cohorts). In whichever case, a few Internet Points is a small price to pay. :)
    - pyrale 5y ago
      The reason is that whether the vaccine is donated or not isn't relevant with regards to exports numbers. Same trick as people proudly touting that US is the #1 philantropy country, ignoring that other countries actually run efficient mutualized welfare services.
      - throwaway894345 5y ago
        Can you elaborate on why this isn’t relevant? What are other countries doing to offset their lack of donations? And can we put numbers around the amounts various countries are exporting and donating, respectively?
        pyrale 5y ago
        Canada probably doesn't need donations, they can afford to buy vaccines. Answering based on donations is a way to sidetrack the relevant metric with regards to Canadian issues (the # and schedule of exported vaccine) and replace it with another metric on which the US usually has less competition. It doesn't mean the current vaccine donation program isn't a great thing, or that the US policy has been wrong. But it's annoying for people explaining a problem to see it reframed so that it shows feel-good results from the US pov. (as for the numbers, [1] shows about >400M doses exported for China as of July 9th and ~350M from Europe as of May 6th, while [2] claims the US donated 160M doses as of now.) [1]: https://dukeghic.org/2021/07/09/taking-a-closer-look-at-vaccine-exports/ https://dukeghic.org/2021/07/09/taking-a-closer-look-at-vacc... [2]: https://www.state.gov/covid-19-recovery/vaccine-deliveries/ https://www.state.gov/covid-19-recovery/vaccine-deliveries/
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    The problem was, when vaccines were in short supply, the US decided to prioritize all Americans, including healthy 16 year olds, over other countries' most vulnerable and elderly population. In early 2021, if N vaccine doses going to another country who would have saved 1000 lives because they were still vaccinating the most vulnerable, the same N doses used in the US would have saved 1, because the most vulnerable were already vaccinated and the vaccines were being used for younger not-at-risk population. Why should any country not criticize the US for prioritizing one American life over 1,000 non-American lives? This compares to the EU which allowed vaccine exports. Thousands of Canadians are alive today that wouldn't have been if the EU acted like the US.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Admittedly the United States' rollout wasn't optimally efficient, and they prioritized American lives early on (before we knew exactly how mass vaccination would play out, mind you--much of your criticism benefits from hindsight). But it's unfair to criticize the US for prioritizing American lives over foreign lives when it's doing far more than all other countries combined to minimize the loss of foreign lives. I could spin that into a divisive shot at Canada or the EU as you've done with America (and I think I could make a much more compelling case), but I don't see the point in being divisive when we have nothing to gain and everything to lose from it. Yes, the early days of COVID vaccination were predictably rocky. What's the excuse today for not working together to vaccinate the world?
- coryrc 5y ago
  It was the Canadian government which rejected allowing Michigan to deliver vaccines to Canadians: https://www.wjtv.com/health/coronavirus/canadian-government-rejects-virus-shots-in-us-border-tunnel/ https://www.wjtv.com/health/coronavirus/canadian-government-...
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    I am talking about the US allowing vaccine shots to be exported to Canada, which should have been a million doses per week. Your link is about Canadians lining up at the border to be vaccinated in the US, which at best would have been in the order of a few hundred doses per week. Even if that plan went ahead, the number of American doses getting into Canadian arms would have been, approximately, a million doses a week short of expectation. If the expectation is 1 million doses and you get a thousand doses, you would be the same amount of disappointed as getting 0 doses. Also, the decision to bar people from getting vaccinated on the other side of the border was not solely a Canadian decision. US disallowed Canadians going there to get vaccinated too. There was a very short period of time between the time Canadians started going to the US for vaccines and the time US banned this practice. Also, your link is from July. That was right around the time vaccines became abundant in Canada and vaccination was opened to all regardless of age and health status. The disappointment was in early 2021, when Canada was still vaccinating 80+ people and US decided to vaccinate all 16+ people before allowing vaccine exports here so we can at least vaccinate people in elderly care homes. > Canadians hoping to cross the border for the sole purpose of getting a COVID-19 vaccine will be turned away, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/confusion-abounds-after-u-s-border-agency-bars-entry-to-canadians-looking-to-get-vaccinated-1.5434903 https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/confusion-abounds-...
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >We Canadians felt this deeply when US kept all their domestically-produced vaccine doses for themselves in early 2021. There is and has never been a US vaccine export ban, and the US has not seized vaccines meant for other countries. If I purchase an item before others, purchase by far the most quantities of that item, pay by far the most overall, and pay a considerable amount of money toward funding its development, I should expect that item before others. Any Kickstarter backer knows this; it's what the US and UK did, and what Canada and the EU did not. The Trump administration last year signed gigantic contracts for every planned vaccine, because no one knew which ones would work. Like, enough for every American from one manufacturer, let alone the current four major available ones. More importantly, the contracts guaranteed the US the earliest deliveries. By early June 2020 (<https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine-trump-moderna.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytim...>) the Trump administration had already identified and was planning to sign the aforementioned huge contracts with Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, Merck, and Pfizer. (An 80% success rate is fantastic in drug discovery.) By that time the US had already paid $2.2 billion to three of the companies. (Also note the skepticism throughout the article that any vaccines could be delivered anywhere within the timeframe the administration was promising.) The UK signed a similar contract for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The EU and Canada did not assure themselves of such quantities. Canada also bet on CanSino because it was afraid that the US would ban vaccine exports (which, again, never happened). Of course, the Chinese did not live up to the contract. Before you say "But what about—", the Trump executive order from December 2020 merely sets up the legal framework to prohibit exports if desired. But that does not mean that the framework is invoked. Let me repeat: The US signed contracts that were a) huge in size/scope and b) from every pharmaceutical company working on a vaccine, which c) got the country the largest and among the first deliveries. The UK did the same thing with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and spent a lot of money to retool domestic plants to produce it in addition to the non-UK doses it bought. By contrast, look at Canada as counterexample. Consider Maclean's desperate attempt to spin its procurement difficulties (<https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccine-effort-actually-go-wrong/ https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccin...>). If you look past the predictable false eliding of the US's firstest-with-the-mostest contracts as an "export ban", the best the magazine can do is admit that * all Canadian contracts with vaccine providers that actually delivered were signed between late July and late September * all contracts were signed after the collapse of the CanSino deal, which Canada had loudly bragged about as proof of its savviness at obtaining vaccines ASAP and circumvent any perfidious US vaccine export ban (which, again, never happened), and which it has done its best since the collapse to pretend that said contract never existed * the other contracts that the magazine cites as proof that CanSino wasn't the only basket Ottawa was putting all its eggs in are with VBI (Who?) and USask. They may or may not yet deliver effective vaccines, but it's all now a bit beside the point, eh? (I don't disagree that to country B waiting on doses, the outcome is the same whether or not the cause is country A implementing an export ban or country A having bought up all the doses by having signed the contract first. But there is a difference.) If the situation were different, might the US have implemented a ban on exporting doses already designated for another country, similar to what the EU did implement toward Australia? Perhaps. But, fortunately, the US never faced this issue, because of the huge amounts of money it invested a year ago and the contracts it signed with said money.

BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago

Yeah, bring that argument when Norway occupies the Crimean peninsula.

smnrchrds 5y ago

We Canadians felt this deeply when US kept all their domestically-produced vaccine doses for themselves in early 2021. We had grown accustomed to the flow of goods and services between US and Canada being uninterrupted. So for many of us, it was a shock and a disappointment when the US decided to turn off the tap.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Honestly, I don't know why this would be so surprising. You're comparing the flow of goods in a stable supply chain with the unprecedented demand for a novel vaccine for which no existing supply chain existed. Of course there wouldn't be a ready flow of vaccine immediately, and of course every country prioritizes its own citizens first and foremost. Now that demand has eased considerably, the US is now donating more doses of vaccine than all of the other countries on the planet combined.
- adventured 5y ago
  You're being downvoted because you're not allowed to point out on HN that the US is donating more vaccine doses than the rest of the world combined. Just like the US donates as much food to the rest of the world as all other nations combined and has been doing it for a century now. US bad.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    It certainly feels like there's a lot of unjustified pressure on this forum to portray the US as categorically worse than every other country. I have other controversial opinions which are at least met by understandable rebuttals, but this "America doesn't do everything horribly" seems to violate some sacred taboo (and I suspect particularly so with the European and progressive American cohorts). In whichever case, a few Internet Points is a small price to pay. :)
  - pyrale 5y ago
    The reason is that whether the vaccine is donated or not isn't relevant with regards to exports numbers. Same trick as people proudly touting that US is the #1 philantropy country, ignoring that other countries actually run efficient mutualized welfare services.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Can you elaborate on why this isn’t relevant? What are other countries doing to offset their lack of donations? And can we put numbers around the amounts various countries are exporting and donating, respectively?
      - pyrale 5y ago
        Canada probably doesn't need donations, they can afford to buy vaccines. Answering based on donations is a way to sidetrack the relevant metric with regards to Canadian issues (the # and schedule of exported vaccine) and replace it with another metric on which the US usually has less competition. It doesn't mean the current vaccine donation program isn't a great thing, or that the US policy has been wrong. But it's annoying for people explaining a problem to see it reframed so that it shows feel-good results from the US pov. (as for the numbers, [1] shows about >400M doses exported for China as of July 9th and ~350M from Europe as of May 6th, while [2] claims the US donated 160M doses as of now.) [1]: https://dukeghic.org/2021/07/09/taking-a-closer-look-at-vaccine-exports/ https://dukeghic.org/2021/07/09/taking-a-closer-look-at-vacc... [2]: https://www.state.gov/covid-19-recovery/vaccine-deliveries/ https://www.state.gov/covid-19-recovery/vaccine-deliveries/
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  The problem was, when vaccines were in short supply, the US decided to prioritize all Americans, including healthy 16 year olds, over other countries' most vulnerable and elderly population. In early 2021, if N vaccine doses going to another country who would have saved 1000 lives because they were still vaccinating the most vulnerable, the same N doses used in the US would have saved 1, because the most vulnerable were already vaccinated and the vaccines were being used for younger not-at-risk population. Why should any country not criticize the US for prioritizing one American life over 1,000 non-American lives? This compares to the EU which allowed vaccine exports. Thousands of Canadians are alive today that wouldn't have been if the EU acted like the US.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Admittedly the United States' rollout wasn't optimally efficient, and they prioritized American lives early on (before we knew exactly how mass vaccination would play out, mind you--much of your criticism benefits from hindsight). But it's unfair to criticize the US for prioritizing American lives over foreign lives when it's doing far more than all other countries combined to minimize the loss of foreign lives. I could spin that into a divisive shot at Canada or the EU as you've done with America (and I think I could make a much more compelling case), but I don't see the point in being divisive when we have nothing to gain and everything to lose from it. Yes, the early days of COVID vaccination were predictably rocky. What's the excuse today for not working together to vaccinate the world?
coryrc 5y ago
It was the Canadian government which rejected allowing Michigan to deliver vaccines to Canadians: https://www.wjtv.com/health/coronavirus/canadian-government-rejects-virus-shots-in-us-border-tunnel/ https://www.wjtv.com/health/coronavirus/canadian-government-...
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  I am talking about the US allowing vaccine shots to be exported to Canada, which should have been a million doses per week. Your link is about Canadians lining up at the border to be vaccinated in the US, which at best would have been in the order of a few hundred doses per week. Even if that plan went ahead, the number of American doses getting into Canadian arms would have been, approximately, a million doses a week short of expectation. If the expectation is 1 million doses and you get a thousand doses, you would be the same amount of disappointed as getting 0 doses. Also, the decision to bar people from getting vaccinated on the other side of the border was not solely a Canadian decision. US disallowed Canadians going there to get vaccinated too. There was a very short period of time between the time Canadians started going to the US for vaccines and the time US banned this practice. Also, your link is from July. That was right around the time vaccines became abundant in Canada and vaccination was opened to all regardless of age and health status. The disappointment was in early 2021, when Canada was still vaccinating 80+ people and US decided to vaccinate all 16+ people before allowing vaccine exports here so we can at least vaccinate people in elderly care homes. > Canadians hoping to cross the border for the sole purpose of getting a COVID-19 vaccine will be turned away, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/confusion-abounds-after-u-s-border-agency-bars-entry-to-canadians-looking-to-get-vaccinated-1.5434903 https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/confusion-abounds-...
TMWNN 5y ago
>We Canadians felt this deeply when US kept all their domestically-produced vaccine doses for themselves in early 2021. There is and has never been a US vaccine export ban, and the US has not seized vaccines meant for other countries. If I purchase an item before others, purchase by far the most quantities of that item, pay by far the most overall, and pay a considerable amount of money toward funding its development, I should expect that item before others. Any Kickstarter backer knows this; it's what the US and UK did, and what Canada and the EU did not. The Trump administration last year signed gigantic contracts for every planned vaccine, because no one knew which ones would work. Like, enough for every American from one manufacturer, let alone the current four major available ones. More importantly, the contracts guaranteed the US the earliest deliveries. By early June 2020 (<https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine-trump-moderna.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytim...>) the Trump administration had already identified and was planning to sign the aforementioned huge contracts with Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, Merck, and Pfizer. (An 80% success rate is fantastic in drug discovery.) By that time the US had already paid $2.2 billion to three of the companies. (Also note the skepticism throughout the article that any vaccines could be delivered anywhere within the timeframe the administration was promising.) The UK signed a similar contract for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The EU and Canada did not assure themselves of such quantities. Canada also bet on CanSino because it was afraid that the US would ban vaccine exports (which, again, never happened). Of course, the Chinese did not live up to the contract. Before you say "But what about—", the Trump executive order from December 2020 merely sets up the legal framework to prohibit exports if desired. But that does not mean that the framework is invoked. Let me repeat: The US signed contracts that were a) huge in size/scope and b) from every pharmaceutical company working on a vaccine, which c) got the country the largest and among the first deliveries. The UK did the same thing with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and spent a lot of money to retool domestic plants to produce it in addition to the non-UK doses it bought. By contrast, look at Canada as counterexample. Consider Maclean's desperate attempt to spin its procurement difficulties (<https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccine-effort-actually-go-wrong/ https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccin...>). If you look past the predictable false eliding of the US's firstest-with-the-mostest contracts as an "export ban", the best the magazine can do is admit that * all Canadian contracts with vaccine providers that actually delivered were signed between late July and late September * all contracts were signed after the collapse of the CanSino deal, which Canada had loudly bragged about as proof of its savviness at obtaining vaccines ASAP and circumvent any perfidious US vaccine export ban (which, again, never happened), and which it has done its best since the collapse to pretend that said contract never existed * the other contracts that the magazine cites as proof that CanSino wasn't the only basket Ottawa was putting all its eggs in are with VBI (Who?) and USask. They may or may not yet deliver effective vaccines, but it's all now a bit beside the point, eh? (I don't disagree that to country B waiting on doses, the outcome is the same whether or not the cause is country A implementing an export ban or country A having bought up all the doses by having signed the contract first. But there is a difference.) If the situation were different, might the US have implemented a ban on exporting doses already designated for another country, similar to what the EU did implement toward Australia? Perhaps. But, fortunately, the US never faced this issue, because of the huge amounts of money it invested a year ago and the contracts it signed with said money.