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..
Nonsense. This isn’t really about countries exporting/not exporting. These vaccine deals are with private companies who produce their product around the world. Just because vaccines are manufactured in a specific country doesn’t make them property of that country.
Whichever country is contractually at the front of the line will have their order fulfilled first/according to the terms of the contracts.
The EU wasted months negotiating lower prices and then took longer with approvals.
There is no good guy or bad guy (at least until the UK or EU blocks exports preventing execution of the private contracts - at that point the country blocking the exports becomes the bad guy).
The official line from these companies always seems to be that they were able to ramp up production to make the vaccines for the UK because the UK committed to its order signficantly earlier than the EU. (I've never seen this next bit said explicitly, but the subtext, as I read it, is that the EU was holding out for a better price.)
Of course I don't know the accuracy of such statements. But if that is true, you could certainly argue it would unfair that the EU should benefit from production capacity that only exists because of commitments made by the UK, and the location of the factories is fairly irrelevant to that.
You could counter argue that I am mistakenly treating the "EU" and "UK" as a single individual person each who deserves to suffer the consequences of their actions, when in fact the people suffering are individual citizens who had almost no control over the negotiation process. But, on the flip side, if companies cannot rely on agreements made during difficult negotiations to be honoured then it will be harder to secure such agreements in future.
> 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..
the position it finds itself in is entirely a result of its inability to competently and promptly negotiate contracts with its suppliers
it was entirely focused on price instead of delivery, and it took months more than the suppliers other customers (e.g. the UK) to agree anything
none of this is surprising behavior for an organisation that is primarily a producer's cartel
the mistake was putting such an organisation in charge of the procurement in the first place
the other outrageous fact is that France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands (the "Inclusive Vaccine Alliance") had all but signed a deal back in June, then the EU commission forced itself into the process, spent three months trying to re-negotiate (for a product being produced at cost), then signed the original deal regardless
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 :( )
When you are in a crisis, the first thing you do is put the oxygen mask on yourself. The crisis in the UK and the US has been severe and it does not help to spread the vaccine around peanut butter style across every country in the world such that only 5% of the population has it.
If anything else, we should be focusing it more on single countries impacted the most to get their essential workers and most impacted covered before moving on to a next one.
In France at least I believe there was (and probably still is) also a distribution problem.
Also health authorities flip-flopping on the benefits and side effects is disastrous from an adoption point of view. First it is not efficient for people over 65, then it is, then it will only be distributed to people over 50, then it is dangerous, then it is not dangerous anymore. You couldn't manufacture reluctance to getting vaccinated more if you wanted to.
The EU didn’t make them, companies with facilities in the EU did. They were exported because the EU managed to delay its procurement process and other countries made their orders earlier.
also AstraZeneca failed to deliver to EU in a big way. 70% less than agreed!!! at the same time AZ exported vaccines from EU. i hope EU will take legal action against AZ
What's interesting about this comment is that it demonstrates the core sources of sclerosis in the EMU. Instead of engaging in a careful investigation to identify roadblocks to the rollout, removing said roadblocks, and then engaging in some soul-searching as to why these roadblocks are there, one immediately starts denouncing their favorite villains, blaming them and while at the same time indulging in fantasies of moral superiority to compensate for one's failures.
"Yes, comrade, we have no toilet-paper, but we do not exploit toiler-paper workers!"
It's obvious why this type of casuistry is so appealing to the powerless, but what's scary is when those in leadership become slaves of the same memes - that's when you know that things will only get much, much worse - as owning your failures is a pre-requisite to learning from them, which is a pre-requisite for effective reform. The EU is a system to grow bureaucracy but reform is effectively blocked by the moralizers. Thus, things will continue to get worse until the all the sanctimonious people are kicked out of office or until the society itself collapses under the massive weight of moralistic bureaucrats.
The EU started this particular game of iterative prisoner's dilemma with the assumption of cooperation. That trust in was betrayed in the first round, and now we're seeing the reaction.
Considering the supply chains cross many borders, there is a good chance this will now escalate further, and total production capacity may well be harmed as a result, which is exactly why cooperation was the first choice. It may have been naive in a practical sense to assume that Johnson and, at the time, Trump would be capable of thinking two steps ahead. But getting burned on an assumption of good faith isn't exactly the worst thing in the world.
Plus, once the US, UK, and Israel are done, and with more capacity coming on-line, the spigot will turn to the EU and the difference may end up being far smaller than one might think from just extrapolating current data.
>"Meanwhile, the UK and US do not export any vaccines at all."
This is untrue. The US in the process of exporting 4 million doses of vaccine between Mexico and Canada[1].
The US has also said that once they have ensured that there is enough vaccine supply for all Americans(likely around May 1st)it will begin exporting any surplus in the summer.[2] The US has not met that target of enough vaccines for its population.
The reality is that US and EU took very different approaches towards vaccine procurement. The US government acted more like an investor and threw insane sums of cash at the drugmakers with very few strings attached and the EU sought lower prices and higher accountability for drug makers. There were very different risk profiles between the two. In the end the EU placed their orders months after the US, the UK and Israel. Ursula von der Leyen seems quite content to shift the blame everywhere else and propagate the view that the EU is being taken advantage of.
The EU has exported 41 millionen vaccine doses of which the UK has gotten 8 million so far
Not “the EU”. Private companies with factories in European countries fulfilled pre-orders placed and paid for months ago. “The EU” owns no factories and produces no vaccines itself.
> the EU is trying to be good and is sharing its vaccinations more or less fairly with other countries (for now)
What's fair about it? The number of exported vaccines would account for only 10% of EU population, by your own admission. Since the poor countries in need of vaccine are from Africa and Asia (mostly), they most definitely have much greater populations. What's fair about exporting just 10% of vaccines?
Export? USA and UK bought those vaccines a year ago from Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and AstraZeneca. Warp Speed, USA gambled and the world is better because of it.
They are contracts and dates on which x million doses are to be delivered by. Why didn't EU do the same? Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways. Say, no vaccine would be produced unless a certain item that is produced in USA goes to a Belgium factory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
The EU doesn't export anything, it's AZ and Pfizer that are exporting, as per their contracts with the UK and other countries. It is up to AZ and Pfizer to decide how to use their factories to meet their contractual obligations with the UK and the EU.
The UK (companies) on the other hand are exporting vaccine components (fatty lipids) that enable those factories to produce vaccines for not only the UK, but the EU, and Australia, if it ever receives its doses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] gaha|5 years ago|reply
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-covi...
[+] [-] kjakm|5 years ago|reply
Whichever country is contractually at the front of the line will have their order fulfilled first/according to the terms of the contracts.
The EU wasted months negotiating lower prices and then took longer with approvals.
There is no good guy or bad guy (at least until the UK or EU blocks exports preventing execution of the private contracts - at that point the country blocking the exports becomes the bad guy).
[+] [-] quietbritishjim|5 years ago|reply
Of course I don't know the accuracy of such statements. But if that is true, you could certainly argue it would unfair that the EU should benefit from production capacity that only exists because of commitments made by the UK, and the location of the factories is fairly irrelevant to that.
You could counter argue that I am mistakenly treating the "EU" and "UK" as a single individual person each who deserves to suffer the consequences of their actions, when in fact the people suffering are individual citizens who had almost no control over the negotiation process. But, on the flip side, if companies cannot rely on agreements made during difficult negotiations to be honoured then it will be harder to secure such agreements in future.
[+] [-] blibble|5 years ago|reply
the position it finds itself in is entirely a result of its inability to competently and promptly negotiate contracts with its suppliers
it was entirely focused on price instead of delivery, and it took months more than the suppliers other customers (e.g. the UK) to agree anything
none of this is surprising behavior for an organisation that is primarily a producer's cartel
the mistake was putting such an organisation in charge of the procurement in the first place
the other outrageous fact is that France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands (the "Inclusive Vaccine Alliance") had all but signed a deal back in June, then the EU commission forced itself into the process, spent three months trying to re-negotiate (for a product being produced at cost), then signed the original deal regardless
[+] [-] xiphias2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krona|5 years ago|reply
The AstraZeneca factory in the Netherlands is owned by AstraZeneca, not the EU commission. World War 2 ended a long time ago.
[+] [-] tempestn|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|5 years ago|reply
If anything else, we should be focusing it more on single countries impacted the most to get their essential workers and most impacted covered before moving on to a next one.
[+] [-] genghisjahn|5 years ago|reply
https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-us-to-send-first-va...
[+] [-] cm2187|5 years ago|reply
Also health authorities flip-flopping on the benefits and side effects is disastrous from an adoption point of view. First it is not efficient for people over 65, then it is, then it will only be distributed to people over 50, then it is dangerous, then it is not dangerous anymore. You couldn't manufacture reluctance to getting vaccinated more if you wanted to.
[+] [-] bengale|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reddotX|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsj_hn|5 years ago|reply
"Yes, comrade, we have no toilet-paper, but we do not exploit toiler-paper workers!"
It's obvious why this type of casuistry is so appealing to the powerless, but what's scary is when those in leadership become slaves of the same memes - that's when you know that things will only get much, much worse - as owning your failures is a pre-requisite to learning from them, which is a pre-requisite for effective reform. The EU is a system to grow bureaucracy but reform is effectively blocked by the moralizers. Thus, things will continue to get worse until the all the sanctimonious people are kicked out of office or until the society itself collapses under the massive weight of moralistic bureaucrats.
[+] [-] IfOnlyYouKnew|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] youngtaff|5 years ago|reply
Moderna is made in Switzerland and then goes to Spain for finishing does that make it an EU or Swiss export?
We all need to cooperate to succeed.
Given the relative country sizes it's weird that the EU seems to have comparatively less vaccine production
And if the EU really wants to 'put the issue to bed' why don't they just publish the export numbers but vaccine type and country?
[+] [-] bogomipz|5 years ago|reply
This is untrue. The US in the process of exporting 4 million doses of vaccine between Mexico and Canada[1].
The US has also said that once they have ensured that there is enough vaccine supply for all Americans(likely around May 1st)it will begin exporting any surplus in the summer.[2] The US has not met that target of enough vaccines for its population.
The reality is that US and EU took very different approaches towards vaccine procurement. The US government acted more like an investor and threw insane sums of cash at the drugmakers with very few strings attached and the EU sought lower prices and higher accountability for drug makers. There were very different risk profiles between the two. In the end the EU placed their orders months after the US, the UK and Israel. Ursula von der Leyen seems quite content to shift the blame everywhere else and propagate the view that the EU is being taken advantage of.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-us-to-send-first-va...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/biden-moves-up-vaccine-tim...
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|5 years ago|reply
The EU bureaucrats were simply worse at negotiating contracts and doing their job.
[+] [-] secondcoming|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semaphor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatinaboat|5 years ago|reply
Not “the EU”. Private companies with factories in European countries fulfilled pre-orders placed and paid for months ago. “The EU” owns no factories and produces no vaccines itself.
[+] [-] perryizgr8|5 years ago|reply
What's fair about it? The number of exported vaccines would account for only 10% of EU population, by your own admission. Since the poor countries in need of vaccine are from Africa and Asia (mostly), they most definitely have much greater populations. What's fair about exporting just 10% of vaccines?
[+] [-] onetimemanytime|5 years ago|reply
They are contracts and dates on which x million doses are to be delivered by. Why didn't EU do the same? Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways. Say, no vaccine would be produced unless a certain item that is produced in USA goes to a Belgium factory.
[+] [-] svara|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scrollaway|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] markus92|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Graffur|5 years ago|reply
I think it is silly that EU citizens are dying and/or locked down because of money and/or contracts.
[+] [-] standardUser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klelatti|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
Europe's Vaccine Disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964197 - Jan 2021 (418 comments)
I think there have been other threads as well?
[+] [-] vrepsys|5 years ago|reply
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
[2] https://twitter.com/AlexTaylorNews/status/137362147260701081...
[+] [-] DrBazza|5 years ago|reply
The UK (companies) on the other hand are exporting vaccine components (fatty lipids) that enable those factories to produce vaccines for not only the UK, but the EU, and Australia, if it ever receives its doses.
[+] [-] dundarious|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FranzFerdiNaN|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DrNosferatu|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] niij|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aeolun|5 years ago|reply
You don’t know how good you have it.
[+] [-] idownvoted|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chki|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwawinsider|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] groos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] config_yml|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vdddv|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] odiroot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
[+] [-] Aardwolf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jopsen|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dependsontheq|5 years ago|reply
I think talking about winning or failed vaccination campaigns might be a bit early.
[+] [-] frankjr|5 years ago|reply
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