Europe's Vaccine Disaster | Hacker News Reader

Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

208 pointsdanielfoster418 comments

Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods.

Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this to work like the Novavax version of roughly the same thing that's just reported good U.K. trial results, but Sanofi/GSK's didn't provide a good enough response in the elderly. They were expected to fulfill up to half of the EU's requirements, but they're restarting with a new Phase I trial next month or so, and they might have something ready by the end of 2021.

So if all that is correct, the EU ended up with a very big hole in their plans and not enough redundancy. By comparison only because I'm in the USA and familiar with our efforts, 5 big bets were made with more than a billion dollars each in up front R&D money. Moderna and now Novavax are looking very good, AZ/Oxford and one dose of Johnson and Johnson's is looking OK, with a two dose study in progress for the latter that might show increased efficacy, and only Sanofi/GSK failed in a really major way.

EU pre-ordered more Pfizer than the US.

Enough for 150 million people in EU, vs enough for 50 million in the US. The US has ordered more after it was approved.

The EU did not pay as much as the US — and signed the contracts much later. Pfizer is doing the rational actor thing and, given a shortage, prioritizing their highest paying clients.

There might also be verbiage in the US contract to this effect. Also, Pfizer is an American company.

The US does currently not allow COVID-19 vaccine exports. Pfizer's plants are only manufacturing for the US while the EU plants are producing for the EU, Isreal, Canada, UK, etc.

coul EU ban vaccine export?

They tried a retaliatory ban against the UK yesterday over the AstraZeneca situation (vaccines in EU plants were exported to the UK last month because the UK were readier to rollout sooner, the UK is not allowing exports from UK plants in return, leaving the EU with a shortfall on vaccines), but because of the way it involved the Northern Ireland border rules agreed in brexit they faced strong opposition from Ireland, also an EU member and I think they've backed down for now

There might also be verbiage in the US contract to this effect. Also, Pfizer is an American company.

But also a multinational, manufacturing their vaccine in the US and Belgium. Initially without any help from Operation Warp Speed, which appears to be a mistake if their December claims about supply chain problems was true, along with eventually signing up to the program and moving up their promise for our second 100 million doses from the 3rd to 2nd quarter.

But that Belgium plant? Something is so wrong with it they're shutting it down for a while to improve capacity ir so they claim. My only good guess is that they have a sterility problem and are finding they have to dump way too many lots they produce after testing for that.

As a Belgian, this is what we've heard and read:

- Pfizer stated on 15 Jan 2021 that they would produce 40% less (60.000 instead of 100.000 doses)

- This delay in production would we compensated in the weeks that follow. In February the production should be compensated.

- This was a temporary measure to scale up production after an extra order was made by the EU

The working group concerning the vaccine and it's distribution was to quote "not amused" by this news and wrote a sternly worded letter.

Source:https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/01/16/versnelde-inenting-z... Text in Dutch.

Your last point, the additional order, is crucial. And media, Spiegel being one of the most outspoken, created enough pressure tp force that order. Not that overall quantity was an issue, so. But all people saw was shortages. There were no delivery schedules published, so that played a role. But I would have expected some more investigation and research.

Then thr EU ordered more, being under fire, and that let to a temporary shutdown of the plant and even more severe shortages.

Nobody is thinking about that. Instead, the Spiegel is using this to push an agenda against von der Leyen. I'll not defend her, she should never have gotten the presidency (EDIT: become head of the Commission) but what is going on now is just cheap propaganda. And definitely not helping in any way.

Ah yes the good old covid story - sovereign states order some medicine/medical equipment from the companies, and on the airport upon sending it to the country comes US government officials with few extra (freshly printed) suitcases of money to change delivery of that order. Remember quite a few articles from spring about that. 3rd world countries having no chance of receiving what was agreed upon.

I mean I understand, when SHTF its everybody for themselves and fuck the rest. I guess in some twisted view a human nature. But I really have to severely twist it and leave any morals behind the door. Next time somebody will be praising US as some force of good in this world, well they can go fuck themselves too.

/rant

Covid is not nearly as high on the priority list for many third world countries as it is for the US. Here covid shuts down everything. In many African countries it is an order of magnitude less impactful than malaria.

There's less testing, less reporting and much less transparency and awareness. Doesn't mean there's less infection or less dying.

> Also, Pfizer is an American company.

BioNtech is a German company. If it would come down to national egotism, BioNtech would just kill the licensing deal and Pfizer wouldn't be allowed to produce anything.

>Pfizer wouldn’t be allowed to produce anything.

Pfizer wouldn’t be allowed to stop producing anything.

I think there are consequences steming out from killing a contractual agreement. They can however license Sanofi and others to produce the vaccine, which is what will be eventually done.

Chinese and the Russian vaccines were not even considered. Now those are used in mass vaccinations, soon EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all.

People don't even want to talk about that, as if those alternatives don't exists. Non-EU countries in Europe are getting them. Serbia(6.1) and Turkey(2.3) are already close to EU average(2.6) or better on the vaccination process.

The Russian scientists have first discussed Sputnik V with EMA (EU's medicine agency) 5 days ago: https://www.msn.com/en-xl/europe/top-stories/russia-files-sp... ; Hungary, which is part of the EU, has already given the vaccine emergency authorization. However, vaccination in Hungary is lagging behind its neighbors Austria and Romania due low levels of trust (in the Russian vaccine) and general antivaxx sentiment. The Chinese have not discussed their vaccines or filed for marketing authorisation in the EU.

The development, evaluation, approval and monitoring process is described in detail here: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/overview/publi...

And on to of that Russia and China are much further behind in the rollout to their own population than the EU itself - see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccination-doses-p...

It wouldn´t surprise me if Russia and China prioritize to sell the vaccines to other countries than attend their own population.

My parents near Moscow got a shot within a few days after asking for it.

Here in Moscow russian citizens can get the vaccine absolutely free in about of 100 authorized medical partners. I've personally got first dose of Sputnik V yesterday without any problems or shortages.

The Russian Gam-COVID-Vac/Sputnik V vaccine looks very good, but for the US or to much of the West, there's a price to be paid for being in an effective state of war with another country. Although Gamaleya is now working with AZ/Oxford to see if substituting one of their doses for one of Oxford's will produce much better results, which I never would have expected.

This is based on the theory that the immune system response to Oxford's virus vector is mostly negating the benefit of the second dose taken 21 days after the first. Gam-COVID-Vac gets around this by using different viruses for each dose, and has 90% efficacy results from their Phase III trial. Unfortunately, no one can yet manufacture it in anything like bulk quantities, but they have set up manufacturing partnerships with a whole bunch of countries from India to South Korea.

The use of Russian and Chinese vaccine is much about trust. No one trusts that the Russians have done proper trials or that the reported data is accurate and no outside party has a means to verify their claims. Time will tell - I very much hope it works, but wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.

France allowed the Pasteur institute to fail - a much desired vaccine was stopped because it wasn't effective enough. Impossible to imagine the same happening in Russia, as Putin needs to project power.

> the theory that the immune system response to Oxford's virus vector is mostly negating the benefit of the second dose taken 21 days after the first

Do you know if there are more trials underway to verify this? I'm guessing it ties in to AZ's encouragement for delaying the second dose i.e. wait until the immune response has died down. I think UK medical consensus is currently recommending 12 weeks rather than the original 3-4.

Non-sequitur, but true: this is a political hatchet job from delivered by a center-left newspaper to a center-right politician. The key to this crisis and article can be found in the middle of the article: "...von der Leyen's press department has been energetic in its defense of the Commissions actions. After all, the EU has secured rights to 2.3 billion doses of vaccine, they have pointed out, with 760 million of them from BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna.

But what use is that when the availability of the vaccine will remain so limited for the foreseeable future? When the producers are unable to deliver what they have agreed to – or can only deliver much later?"

The 12 weeks is not about maximizing protection for an individual recipient, but was a decision made solely to get the first dose to more people faster.

In terms of effect on effectiveness per person it is purely speculative.

> Chinese and the Russian vaccines were not even considered.

The Russian vaccine's "trial" was mostly a non-consensual trial carried out on their military. I expect this lowered confidence.

Does China have a vaccine with decent effectiveness yet? Last time I read about it, the number was around 50%.

Turkey says China's Sinovac COVID vaccine 91.25% effective in late trials

https://www.google.dk/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/i...

I don't see how being consensual or not has any bearing on its efficacy. Not to mention that any model I have of russian military (or any military) tells me that finding volunteers for a pandemic-ending vaccine would be a very easy task.

> being consensual or not has any bearing on its efficacy

Not on efficacy, but in reported efficacy. Basically: if you're willing to be unethical about testing X, why would we trust you to be ethical when reporting about X.

> Non-EU countries in Europe are getting them.

At least one EU country will soon be getting them. Hungary has approved [1] and also ordered [2] the Russian vaccine. Hungary has also approved [3] but not yet ordered the Chinese vaccine.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/covid-hungary-fast-tracks-russian-vacc...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/22/hungary-buys-russia...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccin...

I wonder if the Chinese vaccine with 50% efficiency could be used for herd immunity at all. Im not a virologyst, but the false safety of most people vaccinated with it in a country might could trigger even more death? The Chinese vaccine is not even tested above 59 years old. If the young is vaccinated and start to party etc the new more infectious variants could still spread and can reach even more elderly.

Sure it can. Vaccines are only one part of the puzzle. With 50% population immunity you need far (far) less natural immunity to reach an R number less than one, at which point outbreaks don't grow anymore.

Obviously these magical mRNA vaccines with their 95% numbers are going to be more effective. But that's just a (very) happy scientific accident that they worked out. Historically vaccines haven't been anywhere near that effective and have still controlled disease. Hell, the flu shots we get are like 30% effective and they still save lives every year.

The problem is one of public confidence. 50% effectiveness would be very useful epidemiologically, but you'd still get a lot of pissed off infected people who thought they were safe. Conveying the message that we're going to stick a needle in your arm and it might not do you any good to a public that's already rife with scepticism about vaccines is a PR problem I'm very glad isn't mine to deal with.

AFAIK there's two Chinese vaccines with published data: Sinovac and Sinopharm. Sinovac hasn't had great results but Sinophram has shown initial effectiveness numbers similar to AstraZeneca.

It should be noted that this is likely nit worse than Pfizer, despite marketing. The 50% for Sinovac is real world data; the 95% for Pfizer comes from company phase 3 data.

Well, last night a reputable Israeli HMO posted it’s real world data for Pfizer, and it’s 50% after 18 days and doesnt seem to get much better (but they don’t have enough data yet to know for sure).

And now, although everyone claims Pfizer says you get 50% after 1st dose and 95# after second, if you read the actual filing, that’s not what it says; efficiency is achieved at day 13 by Pfizer data almost fully; and the reduction in severe disease (the only interesting endpoint) is 75% with confidence interval 0-100%

"The data, which looked at more than 700,000 fully vaccinated people in Israel, found that only .04 percent of people contracted Covid-19, according to the head of Israel’s Ministry of Health, Dr. Sharon Alroy Preis at a press conference on Thursday.

The type of vaccine Israel has mostly used is the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine with a small number of doses from Moderna. The two vaccines use the same technology, and in clinical trials were found to be about 95% effective. " https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic... Can you share your datasource claiming that efficacy is only 50%?

>Well, last night a reputable Israeli HMO posted it’s real world data for Pfizer, and it’s 50% after 18 days and doesnt seem to get much better

Their initial results are actually very encouraging[0] in this regard.

[0] https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/Hk2URcnku

Also note that even if the vaccine couldn’t prevent one from getting infected, it could still reduce the severity of the infection (thus saves lives). I’m _guessing_ a less severe infection could potentially reduce the rate of infection as well?

> virologyst

Is this an actual spelling in some dialect of English?

It looks interesting. In medicine, when I see “gy” I’m thinking gynolocologist.

Google Search Trends reports only tiny quantities of “virologyst” compared to “virologist”, and all from countries which are not English-native, so I’d classify it as a spelling mistake.

I still don't know whether my parents should get the Chinese / Russian vaccines or not.

I'm more concerned about lack of efficiency than safety. The problem is that after they get one of the vaccines, they won't have any chance to get more from the Pfeizer vaccine when it arrives.

The Sinovac CoronaVac efficacy is not useless, but not very good from what I've read. Gam-COVID-Vac on the other hand is around 91% https://sputnikvaccine.com/newsroom/pressreleases/the-sputni..., which is quite good while not reaching Pfizer/BioNTech's 95% (the German firm BioNTech developed the vaccine, they partnered with Pfizer to test, manufacture, and distribute it).

Ah, I forgot an important detail: my parents are over 70 years old. The biggest problems with these vaccines are that they can be less effective in old people, and it’s hard to find data on old people.

Just as an example Sinovac is not even used in old people in China as far as I know.

There’s a similar question with AstraZeneca right now, German vaccination committee would like to see more Phase 3 data on old people before moving into Phase 4.

You do know that the error bars on 91% and 94% could make the inverse outcome or equality as likely as your belief in the 94%-is-better..

> EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all.

Ouch. Reading this from Canada hurts.

(We are way behind EU and I would be very surprised if we get ahead of them at any point).

Uh, why do you think that?

You don't appear to be behind the EU in any substantial way. (2.61 doses/100 administered for EU, 2.49/100 for Canada)

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

----

You've purchased more vaccine relative to population than basically anyone else in the world and you appear to be higher than the EU in terms of the line for deliveries.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

> Uh, why do you think that?

It has been an unfolding story for the past couple of weeks. I wish I know of an article which summarized everything with a timeline, but I do not. The gist of it is that, Canada has purchased many vaccines, but they will not be coming soon enough. It also lacks the leverage that US, UK, and EU have in terms of the production being domestic. So when Pfizer ran into production issues, initially they planned to cut Canada's deliveries by ~50% for 4 weeks but EU's by a 8% for 2 weeks. Of course the issue has developed since then, but the central issue remains the same: Canada is not a priority for getting vaccines, and does not have the leverage to make itself the priority. I am deeply concerned that EU would simply block exports to Canada to make up for the shortfalls in its share of the vaccines. Even before the new laws, that was close to what was happening in practice, with deliveries to Canada being affected most and to EU the least.

Also, Canada's not being far behind is because we started earlier. We have seen our vaccine doses administered per capita ranking go from 6th to 21st. Most of the countries that got ahead of us are the EU countries. And every day, we fall behind more and more EU countries, as our deliveries have been deprioritized compared to EU's. Or at least so it seems. We won't know the full truth until the dust settles. Probably a year from now.

Canada has no large scale vaccine production capacity so even if they could license the production they couldn't produce any decent amount any time soon.

I hope this is something that changes post pandemic.

I wonder why not cover younger people with the GSK version and older people with some other vaccine?

Excellent question. Probably the biggest factor is that Phase III trials are insanely expensive, like a billion dollars plus or minus. High touch, 30,000 people minimum for the US, lasts two years, etc. Sanofi/GSK is hazarding some of their own money in this, and has to look at the market for COVID-19 vaccines, which is obviously weighted towards the elderly.

Might also be risk management in wondering if the final results for the younger would be disappointing or worse, this problem with the elderly was learned through surrogate endpoints from serological as in blood testing of immune system responses. See Oxford for how they were led astray from their first big 500 Phase I/II people test of their vaccine platform, and achieved much worse results than they anticipated when put in the crucible of multiple Phase III trials and the real endpoints of getting COVID-19, or serious cases of it.

> Phase III trials are insanely expensive, like a billion dollars plus or minus

Do you have a source for that?

JAMA Internal Medicine says a median of 19 million, but that's for all drugs, not specifically vaccines.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...

Not a good or recent one, but reading the linked article indicates the sort of trials being done for vaccines will have a median much greater than the $19 million you cite. These trials enroll 30,000 subjects at minimum, and take 2 years, both of which substantially exceed the maximums cited in the paper that they or anyone else they knew of had tried. In the case of length, by 4 times.

Thinking further, a billion is too high an estimate today, because these trials or one I looked closely at use smartphone "ediaries" to reduce the number of direct person to person contacts. But they're still high touch affairs, nothing substitutes for phone calls and direct examinations, although the latter are limited in number, but start with a general medical exam.

Thanks for bringing that paper to my attention, I'll look more closely at it later.

That figure doesn’t pass the smell test. I think you’re confusing the cost of a phase III trial with the total end-to-end cost of developing new drugs.

Injecting 30,000 people twice with a vaccine & tracking their post injection experience does not cost $1billion. (Googles) The FDA thinks a phase III trial costs about $20million. So there you go.

Gentlemen, the hole is due to the fact that no company has the large scale productive capacity for the newly discovered COVID-19 vaccine.

Ordering earlier and paying more would just have shifted distribution around, and would not have made more doses available. Every vaccination done in the US or the UK means one less vaccine dose for Europe.

And that is not "ducking responsibility", it is basic logic - as one cannot fit 10 pegs in 9 holes, one cannot vaccinate 10 people with 9 doses.

Your model seems to assume a fixed production capacity? It would seem plausible that if you paid an extra billion or two, companies could find a way to scale up production faster.

Well the fact that the companies own the stuff that was researched with tax payer money, which then tax payer money must buy again also doesn't help to scale. As there is no real market but just an oligopol of producers. If the formulas would be public domain, the producers can compete who is fastest and there would be much more and they still earn good money...

I just have been sollicitated to test the Janssen/Johnson and Johnson. Seems that it is still in Phase III in Western Europe. I'm not 100% sure to want to participate, split between: ok there is enough vaccine i'll be vaccinated in 3m OR OK i need to do this because we need more vaccines.

Janssen has finished recruiting for their 1 dose Phase III trial, but is still doing that for their 2 doses 8 weeks apart trials, this huge one https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04614948 and this small one in the US and Belgium https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04436276 There reporting on their one dose trial's efficacy results is pretty good, about what I expected, so if this gets you that one first dose ASAP its seriously worth considering. It's also a relatively mature platform, used previously for their Ebola vaccine which passed an European Phase III trial, but wasn't the earlier one that made such a difference in the last outbreak.

The other vaccines you might get are less mature platforms, AZ/Oxford 2 doses 21 days apart has less efficacy than Janssen's 1 dose (Oxford had not before 2020 ever tried testing their platform on more than 40 people at a time), the mRNA vaccines I'm sure you've heard all about, but I wouldn't make any bets on when Pfizer will be able to provide you a dose from their currently? closed Belgium plant.

You're saying this despite the weekly pcr and different efficacy testing methods?

Can you be more specific? I'm happy to drill down to the individual Phase III trial protocols, but want to know which ones you're referring to. Plus I'm pretty sure I left myself a lot of wiggle room with efficacy claims like "very good" and "OK."

Some of the efficacy methods involved you saying you're sick and then getting tested (Pf/Mod). Others were you were swabbed weekly (thereby catching asymptomatic infections (AZ)). So the efficacy rates between the bunch aren't apples to apples comparisons. AZ has an understated efficacy rate, so it's better than 'OK'.

It explains Jansens efficacy being broken down up to the number of hospitalisations (where it reduces nearly all of them)

AZ has an understated efficacy rate, so it's better than 'OK'.

Maybe, but their and Oxford's testing has been such a mess, with more than one lie promulgated by AZ in public claims (the blended efficacy based on an appalling Oxford mistake that suggested a better dosing that later didn't pan out), that I don't have much confidence in their current Phase III claims. Which date back to early December and haven't been publicly updated. Those are based on 4 trials in different countries, less than 6,000 each for the official 21 day apart dosing and a 70% efficacy claim.

From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate?

The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Which was a pretty big surprise to both the ROI and the UK. The first not being consulted on the decision, and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca. They've now backed out of this decision: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on...

Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program, the EC/EU has made themselves look like total amateurs by whining about it in public and trying to shift the blame and conflating the UK & AstraZeneca. I think they really need to sit a bunch of the big names down together and actually plan their public strategy; Macron's been out today going in a completely different direction but somehow also circling back to blame the UK and simultaneously claiming (falsely) that the Oxford vaccine has a less than 10% success rate in over 65s, which probably isn't going to boost vaccine adoption: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macro...

It has been an...odd day, as someone who is a very pro-EU, remain-voting, UK citizen. God knows we deserve plenty of blame as a nation but I don't really feel like it's altogether deserved this time.

Leyen failing upwards is a pretty accurate description of her political career in Germany.

She was never popular, one of her first "big ideas", as the head of the ministry for families, was to introduce DNS Internet-censorship against child pornography, which ultimately failed due to the public backlash.

Like many other German career politicians, her doctors dissertation was found to be partly plagiarized.

Her changes to the family allowances were across the board unpopular: High income couples profited the most from these changes, while middle and lower income classes lost out.

There's even an active committee of inquiry still going on into her habit of hiring external, private, consultants to do the work for her at ministries. As a response to that she had the data on her mobile phone deleted, official files illegally redacted, and other data, that could be used as evidence, straight up deleted.

For many Germans she's the definition of what's wrong with German politics because she didn't get where she is out of her own abilities, but rather as a consequence of her family having had that kind of influence in Germany for generations [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_family

> For many Germans she's the definition of what's wrong with German politics because she didn't get where she is out of her own abilities, but rather as a consequence of her family having had that kind of influence in Germany for generations

Lucky her, now we think of Scheuer instead. Her fuckups are pretty tame compared to that guy... and he's still not canceled.

https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Scheuer

Quite sadly, the english wiki article is... well pretty misleading about this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Scheuer

PKW-Maut isn't even mentioned..

She is a product of the CDU - which promotes based on internal networks, not quality results. I would say she's not one of the worst politicians - everyone with that length in public life has a few scandals. I haven't forgiven her for her censorship laws, but the other 'scandals' seem rather be a matter of hubris (often confused with 'vision'). In other countries that's a normal expectation - new policies such as on childcare will have some birthing problems - but in germany politicians usually have waited for a solid plan before they announce big measures.

I think Alice Schwarzer's words seeded some doubt in me, that v.d. Leyen got a fair chance overall. Seems like she lost her ways in fighting conservative opposition all her career. Anyway, Schwarzer is a nasty person, with some rather ignorant positions, so whatever. I just don't want to jump to conclusions on v.d. Leyen, without really reading up on shit, no more.

I'm also pro-EU,remainer,etc. The problem is that the EU is the political graveyard, because countries send the most absurd people there. Not all of them,of course,but a lot. EU works when things are going slow and because of the sheer economical scale and power, everybody takes it serious when it comes to negotiations. But the EC isn't a bunch of experts on rapid situations. It's exactly the same when a French civil servant complained that they are being outbid when buying masks, because the state can't pay upfront, while the Americans ( individuals) could,so essentially a 60 million people country ended up competing against a few individuals with cash. Same with vaccines: while the EK were trying to come up with something, Israelis already were calling around the globe to make sure they get it first.

The institutional design of the EU is unique in its setup as a supranational entity - it's neither an international organisation nor a state, it's something in between. Usually it mainly acts on 'market stuff' and the institutional structures are designed for careful compromise finding, especially to balance out any excess weight of the big countries. But since 2005 or so it has been pushed more and more in the geopolitical and criss-reaction realm where these careful but slow processes struggle. The UK gov can take an important spending decision on its own authority (or at most involving the commons and lords) but where it doesn't have the ultimate authority itself (e.g. some trade deals) the EU has to get agreement from the European parliament and 27 national governments.

thats true. At least in Germany, you are just sent to the EU Parlament if you re not performing well in the country level.

Italy as well. When they want to get rid of somebody at national level and save everybody's face, they promote to some role in the EU. Somebody come back, others stay there for years or forever.

It's Romans' "promoveatur ut amoveatur", promove to remove.

Except von der Leyen was sent in as head of the Comission, a position which is essentially the Prime Minister of the EU. The PM's or the head of the Comission's job is to get sh*t done, as opposed to bragging about it and passing the responsability and the blame onto others.

Sorry to say but BJ is way better in this regard. He has delivered Brexit and the UK is in a much better position regarding vaccinations.

Yes Legen is a bit like an EU prime minister, but she doesn't have the same prerogatives. The EU has the ultimate authority only on a narrow number of economic issues, but e.g. on borders and health it needs to get the agreement of 27 goverents to act.

The EU is a compromise machine designed to manage the expectations and needs of 27 countries, not a presidential system where a Trump or Putin can sign executive decisions changing laws with the stroke of a pen. So Johnson or Trump as heads of the commission would likely manage to do better publicity-wise but I doubt they could get much faster results.

BJ and DT.

We even have an entire saying about it: "Hast du einen Opa, schick ihn nach Europa." ("If you have a grandpa [to get rid of], send him to Europe [i.e. Brussels/Strasbourg].")

The CDU is also the worst for trying to enforce their German politics through EU law.

I am pro-EU, but I think the authoritarian countries (Poland, Hungary) need to be kicked out or at least punished. The EU states are too diverse right now in terms of values and economy. Hard to effectively lead such a bunch.

I wish countries would send their best to the EU. We could get shit done. (tho, overall I am very happy with EU legislation)

The vaccine situation, being played by Pfizer, shows exactly that the EU needs to act more confident and show strength.

lol, by authoritarian you just mean "not leftist".

The UK is far more authoritarian than anywhere in Eastern Europe, arresting thousands of people for speech crime every year, refusing to allow the registration of opposition political parties, engaging in massive surveillance of the population, illegally jailing political dissidents etc etc. Did you advocate kicking us out?

No, of course not, because it's done in the cause of liberal globalism (people are jailed for saying things that offend left wing victim groups, the people surveilled are "right wing extremists", the parties refused registration are "far right", the dissidents jailed are "right wing populists" etc) so people like you have no problem with it.

I mean you literally advocate "punishing" countries that fail to submit to liberal leftist ideology, and say the EU needs more "shows of strength", you're not "anti-authoritarian, you're just a left wing authoritarian.

But yes, go ahead and kick them out, they'll be lucky to be free of the EU's subversion of their national cultures.

EU need those countries mainly because of cheap workforce, army and to create this buffer between Central Europe and Russia.

EU cannot afford to loose the 8th strongest army of Europe and have it potentially getting aligned with Russia. It would be a disaster for Germany, to have Poland as enemy right now and have them doing military exercises together with Russia some km from the Germany/Poland border. Yes, Poland has a strong aversion to Russia, but being kicked out from EU, would force them to search for new partners, and Poland, together with Belarus, would open a tunnel from Moscow to Berlin. Germany dont want it. Russia would do everything to have it.

Another point is that a lot of sectors in Germany depends heavily on Polish workforce, specially in the border region like Brandenburg, Saxony and Mecklenburg Vorpommern.

> The EU states are too diverse right now in terms of > values and economy. Hard to effectively lead such a bunch.

That´s exactly one of the main complains from Hungary and Poland, regarding migration. A diverse country in terms of values is hard to lead. So in that matters you are pretty well aligned with them.

kicking out Poland, means isolating Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and at the same time, giving a freeway from Moscow to Russia. It would be a bad move thinking from the geopolitics point of view.

I know people at the European Medecines Agency that were angry at Ursula von der Leyen in December because she was always making public announcements (about the beginning and speed of the vaccination campaign) with no regard for the reality of regulatory activities or manufacturing and logistics constraints.

> Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program

But let us be clear that it isn’t, and they are not.

Do you know how many doses UK is getting over the same period? Does UK also missing 60% of their contract or they are prioritized?

The UK actually ordered that vaccine way before the EU, the UK essentially paid for manufacturing to start.

EU didn't, and only ordered it after it was clear it would work. 3 months later than the UK.

So astrazeneca started manufacturing doses in the UK 3 months ago, but the manufacturing teething problems in the EU factory are 3 months behind.

Essentially the EU, at best, are trying to jump the queue, which is very frowned upon over here in roast beef. At worse they were too slow paying for their own vaccine, are shocked to find you can't magic it out of thin air and are now trying to steal it from the UK to save face.

Well... maybe not. What the EU suspects is that vaccine that was produced in the EU with EU money was shipped to the UK in December. I have read that even until last week shipments went from the EU to the UK.

If so, AZ and/or the UK government are actively cheating the EU. Is it true? I guess time will tell.

Good source for latest vaccine news: https://twitter.com/QuentinAries

From the reports we're seeing over here the claim is that until the Wrexham factory came online, we were producing the vaccine in the UK but shipping it to the Netherlands for fill and finish, and then it was shipped back. If that is the case then the EC is going to look a bit stupid. If it does turn out that AZ has been shipping vaccines fully produced in the EU to the UK then I can understand their anger more, although I think it's a bit daft to make a public fight out of it - to me it would make sense that early production would be routed to the UK as we approved the vaccine earlier, and we could get a head-start on vaccinating our most vulnerable population, and then when the EU approved it later we could have returned the favour and routed some of our production back that way. But I also understand that the UK hasn't exactly inspired...confidence in our generosity in recent years.

The EU doesn't own everything in the EU, it's not the Soviet Union (much as people like you seem to want it to be).

They aren't "EU vaccines". Astra Zeneca can ship them wherever they want based on contractual and legal practices. Those are privately owned AstraZeneca facilities. The idea that you can separate out "EU money" within a private company is also ridiculous.

If the EU wants to start playing games then other countries and corporations will simply remove the EU from supply chains etc. Japan and South Korea for example trusted that normal contractual and legal practices would be followed when they ordered vaccines produced in the EU, and are now publicly stating their concern.

Do you think they'll ever trust the EU again if it tries to violate their contractual rights on the moronic grounds that "they were made in the EU therefore they belong to the EU"?

Some journo sent an email that wasn't answered and suddenly they've "used" a random amount of money?

This is Astrazeneca, with a turnover of $24 BILLION. £336 million is a couple of days turnover for them. The accusation doesn't even stand up to the slightest little bit of scrutiny or common sense.

You shouldn't rely on Twitter for "news".

AZ set up a separate supply chain in each major jurisdiction. As I understand it, the EU interfered in its member countries' contracts, delayed them 3 months, delaying the EU supply chain from starting.

Ridiculously, from what I can see, in the contract the EU specifically stated they could only supply a few early doses from the UK in 2020 (because after Jan 1 the UK is outside the EU and they are not permitted to use non-EU production) and have then been trying to make spurious claims they're supposed to divert UK doses nearly a month afterwards.

Sorry to say it looks like EU Commission incompetence layered on some more EU Commission incompetence.

The EU didn't interfere in any contracts. Some countries were moving ahead but the small ones were scared to be left out in the cold so pushed for it to be done by the EU instead of the big countries. Then once it was in the EU decision process some individual countries slower the agreement process with worries about price, ...

Either way Brussels would get the blame - as too expensive, buying the wrong ones, not managing to agree quick enough, etc. But it's not as if someone in the commission just said and twiddled thumbs, they were negotiating, then convincing countries to agree, negotiating again, ...

It's easy to point at 'the EU' but the Brussels institutions were asked to do it, rather than took this from someone. The countries were probably happy to have someone to blame later. What I would love to know is which country held things up in council - as the article says, some were doubting mRNA vaccines and others tried to go cheaper and that was the reason for the delay.

The UK Government haven't yet made any specific statement about the vaccine export ban yet, have they? The only statement has been about the Northern Island border.

> and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca

Agreed. The only "people" that seem to be blaming the UK Gov are the media.

> Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here,

The AZ-UK contract will say similar things to the EU contract, and AZ are upholding their part of the contract at the moment, delivering 'best reasonable efforts', and for all countries they've signed with. They're behind on deliveries for the UK as well. The UK signed commercial contracts with AZ, Pfizer and so on, as you would normally do.

One of the problems is that the EU contract (and others, presumably) just isn't worded specifically enough. VdL and the EU are choosing to read 'best reasonable efforts' to mean different things [0], when in contract law it has a very specific and well understood meaning. As a result, VdL does not want to respect the queue of nations that have ordered before the EU that have also signed similar contracts to which AZ has similar, if not identical, contractual obligations.

If this goes to the ECJ (?), AZ vs EU, it would be surprising, and worrying if the ECJ ruled in favour of the EU. Many companies would be reluctant to sign future contracts with the EU if they thought the EU would just ride roughshod over them.

I recall reading that the supply of lipids (I'm probably wrong, I can't find the link) for the vaccine come from the UK, so if that's true, I really hope for everyone's sake, it doesn't turn into a pathetic tit-for-tat blocking of exports.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe...

No way UK is to blame for this, just pure arrogance of narcissistic EU commission trowing a temper tantrum about how it can't possibly be even wrong after having grabbed all responsibility for delivering the vaccine because it was her moment to shine after the brexit, and then start pointing fingers at the first set back.

No one blamed UK. This blame thing is completely made up by UK media.

Not just UK media, German media as well. But maybe not to yhe same extent.

lol, the EU is publicly doing it and there are people in this thread doing it.

I am in the UK and while in the EU I thought we were part of the world's reasonable ethical block, but now from outside it is apparent how badly the EU bullies and intimidates other countries.

A significant part of the vaccines the UK has administered were produced in EU factories. Now that the EU tries to do the same as countries like the UK and the US do - not exporting - they are bullies? Right.

> A significant part of the vaccines the UK has administered were produced in EU factories

Yes, and those vaccines are, or were, only approved for use in the UK, the EU, only yesterday finally approved the AZ vaccine, 3 months after the UK. So who else are the pharma companies going to ship those vaccines to, when the shelf life is weeks or months?

There is a global supply chain at work here, from the substances for the vaccines, to the equipment, and even skilled labour used to produce them. Very little of that, if any, is subject to export bans.

The UK does not have an export ban on vaccines. The EU is free to sign contracts with any vaccine supplier in the UK. But history seems to be repeating itself again. The EU hasn't signed with Novavax, who have just passed trials. The UK signed 5 months ago, and it will be produced in NE England. [0]

0. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1390787/EU-vaccine-deal...

Approval doesn't matter when AZ has to build stock to meet deadlines. Basically they weren't building stock to fulfill UK orders, from EU based production.

It takes months to build stock, but they were flushing that stock to UK.

The two different vaccines the UK has administered had different contractual and manufacturing arrangements - the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine has separate manufacturing facilities for the UK and the EU, with each being contractually tied to the supply of vaccines for that area, whereas the Pfizer/BioNTech one both contracted for supply for the same manufacturing facility. As I understand it, the UK wanted at least one locally manufactured vaccine as a precaution in case Trump went and banned exports (and I suspect the EU also wanted theirs manufactured locally for the usual reasons).

I think this is all quite played up in the media. Pressure is on and each time a single EU government - here Macron - says something the UK make it out as the evil EU.

> From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate?

That's how EU politics work. It's a storage area for unpopular politicians that did not do well at the national level, and a recycling center for unpopular legislation that was not approved in national legislatures. An example of the latter, also from Germany, is the copyright directive, which recycles proposals that German publishers could not get passed in their Bundestag.

From what my German friends told me, that was exactly the case. And her transition to Brussels was a move to save her and CDU's face.

It should be noted that von der Leyen got this job not because she was recommend by anyone in Germany. The actuall suggestion supposedly came from Macron. In the vote for her among governments. Germany was the only one to not vote for her, due to an intervention by the social democratic party that is a member of the current german government.

France and Germany wanted both to head the European Central Bank and the European Commission, with both favoring the ECB. France got the ECB position in the end, most likely as part of a deal.

Nobody actually knows how she got the job. The person who runs the EU, the most powerful organisation in Europe, is appointed via a secret process decided in meetings with no public agenda and no published minutes.

The closest I've ever seen to an explanation was one well known senior MEP's claim that "the next head of the EU must be a woman". Same thing as Kamala Harris. von der Leyen in turn then insisted that 50% of the Commissioners be women. Constitutionally, the head of the commission does not get to pick the commissioners, the countries do, but if there's one thing I've learned about the EU over the years it's that it's a big fan of law as long as the law is convenient for its own goals. Given it writes those laws that's usually pretty easy, but the moment the rules go against what it wants politically they are very suddenly ignored, often to a breathtaking scale.

Observe how von der Leyen blatantly lied about the contents of the redacted contract to the whole world. She was only caught because the Commission suck at PDF. It's hard to imagine it's the first time she has boldly lied like that.

Your view of von der Leyen is pretty much correct. The problem is, so, the Spiegel has an axe to grind with her. Various reasons, she being from the CDU, being former Defense Minister, working with defense companies and the Big 5 consultancies. The defence company and defense ministry thing goes back the 60. Then defense minister Strauss, also head of the Bavarian CDU sister party CSU, illegally raided the Spiegel offices. And was the driving force behind EADS / Airbus as well. Ever since, the Spiegel is driving an agenda in that direction. Sometimes they loose themselves doing so. Their whole reporting of the Covid vaccine story is just another example where they totally miss the main issue.

Absolutely, the appeals to “fairness” have been particularly unedifying to hear whilst there are vast swathes of the world unable to access anything like the quantity of vaccine the EU has a hold on.

> Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate?

Yes, I'm strongly irritated that she still has *any* job in politics after the failures she caused and the fact that a lot of it smelled quite a bit of a dangerous mix of incompetence and corruption....

But then I also have not looked too much into here (or politics in general) so I might be wrong.

There's lots of medical companies in most countries of EU. Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out?

Why does the company X developed medicine only have to be made by company X? That's against the whole idea of patents, which is making information available and usable via licensing. Money shouldn't be the issue, the cost of the shots is negligible so there is not much profit to be made there. Instead licenses should be more profitable since time is worth a lot of money.

There are also a lot of vaccines under development. There should always be multiple well resourced efforts under way. Unfortunately it seems some promising alternatives for development, testing or mass production have been starved for funding.

> Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out?

In the case of the mRNA vaccines, according to comments I saw on some prior COVID vaccine discussion, they depend on specialized precursors that not many companies can make.

mRNA vaccines are still quite new. Some human mRNA vaccines were developed before COVID, but they didn't do well in testing and none were approved. With no one needing to make mRNA vaccines in more than research and trial quantities, not many companies developed the capacity to make the prerequisites.

The issue then is not getting Pfizer to license their vaccine to some other company to make too. It's that Pfizer is already making as much of it as can be made right now due to precursor availability limits.

It's not clear to me that there is any idle production capacity. Pfizer, Moderna and AZ got to the approval gate first, but they started their lines months in advance knowing they needed to start delivering orders. I assume that's true of everywhere.

The simple truth is that there is no plausible way to deliver all the vaccines that nations want to inject right now, and given the size of the project there's no way that distribution is going to be fair. That is true at local levels (c.f. media stories of US boutique clinics getting vaccine before urban hospitals) and global ones the same.

The US and UK have an advantage of larger existing pharma industries and so have a head start, leading to grief in Europe like the linked article. But... this wasn't really resolvable. If it wasn't the EU it would have been someone else unexpectedly behind. No one's going to be happy until we're all vaccinated.

There were multiple efforts - but no reason to collaborate.

And the French effort utterly failed to the point that they gave up. And Germany’s BioNTech signed an exclusive deal with Pfizer.

Sanofi is going to produce the Pfizer vaccine too, it was reported by Bloomberg a couple days back.

EDIT: found a CNBC article https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/26/sanofi-to-produce-100-millio...

BioNTech's vaccine, not pfizer. Pfizer is just the distributer.

If the vaccines were developed publicly, there would be no reason not to collaborate.

It is at least partly developed (or funded) publicly.

Lots of comments are complaining about how EU "paid less" for the vaccine than country XYZ, but actually EU funded AstraZeneca with hundreds of millions of euros to develop the vaccine in the first place.

In any case unless AZ, EU etc. are able to come to reasonable agreement I think this might eventually lead to EU simply breaking the patent and then anyone can make the vaccine. That would be extremely hardcore measure to use, but in current situation, definitely possible.

Oxford A/Z vaccine was developed at Oxford university and AZ joined later to manufacture it (after UK gov intervened, Oxford team was originally in talks with US Merck). This article [1] has back story.

EU paid millions to pharma companies (€1.78bn), that's true. However UK paid more than that(€1.9bn) and US invested even more €9bn.[1] I personally do not understand why EU bargained to start with and why it did not invest more, when damages are much bigger.

I do not think EU can break any patent, they do not own it. "Vaccitech owns intellectual property used in the Oxford vaccine's development" [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/29/we-had-to-go...

[2] https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-professor-oxford-vac...

Hundreds of millions of dollars? Not even a billion dollars was set aside for vaccines as trillions of dollars are being lost?

Then, knowing EU, we would be rolling out the first vaccines in 2022 or later.

If the vaccines were developed publicly there might not be any vaccines. This is not your ordinary flu shot.

About a quarter of the long list of vaccines was developed by public universities. Almost all were developed with billions in public subsidies.

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

Only a few governments can be smug about how they handled Covid, and they are all in Asia (counting New Zealand and Australia as Asia, which is hand wavy). Even those who can make such a claim are still only one mistake from it all crashing down.

Europe likes to think they are doing better than the US, but the truth is they are not very different.

> Europe likes to think they are doing better than the US, but the truth is they are not very different.

That's a bit of an understatement. It's just ignorant nationalism if the numbers are often independently audited and widely available online. The US will probably have a higher death rate than the European average, with some countries faring better and a few worse, but will probably maintain its head start in vaccinations given the later rollout and supply issues in the EU. Hopefully, both sides of the pond will be back to full working order this year.

There are very different countries within Europe.

If you only look at European countries then there looks like there’sa lot of variance in outcome. Taking a broader view including the aforementioned Asian (plus Aus and NZ) countries Europe all looks pretty much equally bad in terms of results, even if their policy interventions have been quite different.

Mishandling of COVID is on the EU to a large part. Not only for the vaccine procurement. The EU also, for a very long time, actively prevented meaningful border inspections and border lockdowns that would have prevented a lot of spillover from hard-hit to not-so-hard-hit countries. E.g. in county-level charts you can see which ones border on high- and low-COVID neighbours.

What are you talking about? Countries have been closing borders left and right, the EU hasn't prevented this.

That's a joke - even during the strictest lockdowns, you could travel easily across europe if wanted. Yes often you end up in quarantine at the destination, that is largely not enforced so just best hope. But if you cross 5 states while getting to your destination, they just let you through.

Has been like that since... whole covid. We traveled from west to east and back 4x during 2020 through 4 countries, never any issue, mostly no border controls.

The only exception was when French imposed strict lockdown and limited people to 1km around their house. That lasted couple of weeks. That's it. Even right now you can travel freely within EU.

"Europe is facing a vaccine disaster. Whereas countries like Israel, Britain and the United States. are quickly moving ahead with vaccinations, the EU is reeling from a string of setbacks. "

this is a lie, per capita EU is not that bad considering that it is a coordinated effort (as opposed to a singular effort by a singular country).

Overall this is Der Spiegel making an opinion article disguised as a news article. Shame on them.

The EU has administered 2 doses per hundred citizens. The UK and US have administered 12 and 8 respectively.

The EU treated this like a procurement exercise, fussing over price and process and not buying sufficiently diverse portfolio.

UK and US treated this like an emergency. Every day of lockdown costs close to total vaccines expenditure, so they moved fast.

Now the EU is scapegoating a company that is producing the vaccine at cost, faster than other firms, because it is more advanced in its separate UK supply chain, that was established and approved to start distribution months ahead of EU.

Saying the EU process was different so it is understandable that it took longer, because it saved some cost or saved some duplication of procurement energy is missing the point. This is a disaster. The only thing that matters is speed!

Spiegel's article is not a 'lie'.

Its a coordinated effort, a fair comparison needs to at least take that into consideration.

Even so:

Why are you comparing "today" EU numbers with those of countries that started a one or two months earlier?

If so, what makes you think that is a fair comparison (even disregarding the cost of the coordinated effort)?

Can we compare "today" EU numbers with those of countries that have just started vaccinations? Would that be fair?

Doesn't it sound fishy to you when Der Spiegel compares a multi-country federation with multiple-languages and cultures to a single country with 9 million habitants with known shady non-democratic practices (like selling the data of its own citizens to move ahead of the vaccination stack)?

USA has administered 28m vaccines compared to the EU's 12m, despite having a smaller population.

I don't have any info on this 'shady non-democratic practice', but the reasons I have seen for other countries getting vaccines earlier is that they committed funds to build up capacity earlier while the EU haggled on price and liability law.

I am grateful for vaccine manufacturers for working around the clock to develop, demontrate validity of and manufacture, at cost, millions of doses. Scapegoating them seems misguided to me.

If you have some evidence for this shadiness, can you share it?

It was about Israel. 9m population.

The article uses Israel as the prime example.

There are multiple sources for the deal they made, here is one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-pfiz...

No, the governments learned of Covid at the same time. There was no law of nature constraining the EU to start later, or compelling US and UK to start earlier.

Normally, it makes sense to do this. Negotiate price, avoid hassle of repeated procurement energy, wait until you have more certainty about trial results and manufacturing process.

This situation was a national disaster, not a normal procurement exercise. The EU should have committed earlier to a broader range of vaccines because the cost benefit was trillions of euros of human live and economic damage costs compared to billions of euro of potentially redundant vaccines.

That they didn't do this, and now are scapegoating the manufacturers, is a 'catastophe' from my perspective. Coordination and delays are explanations but not mitigations.

EU is not a country.

The EU is 3x worse than the US, 4-5x worse than the UK and about 20x worse than Israel. It's one of the few - maybe the only - developed "countries" that has both a record number of cases and low vaccination rates. How is that not bad?

A lot of pro-EU people refuse to blame to commission because they see it, justly, as a vindication of the Brits who warned of the EU bureaucracy when they left. But IMO, being pro-EU starts by naming the problems in the commission so that they can be fixed.

Please provide data. How did you make the comparison? Does it consider that these countries moved up the priority stack through shady tactics and started vaccination earlier than the EU?

Are you analysing the numbers per capita? total? average in 7 days?

Please be constructive.

The data is easily available by searching Google.

The EU has been slow to order doses from viable partners and always seems to be the last to approve new vaccines. Some EU countries are only now giving their first vaccines.

What shady tactics did other countries use? To be fair it’s not reasonable to demand someone show data and then allude to “shady tactics” without providing evidence, though I don’t doubt that shady tactics were probably used all around.

Does not answer the question or expand on what time interval the data is collected.

However, since you played the Google card, please take it back:

"What shady tactics did other countries use?"

Also easily available by searching Google.

I'm using the only statistic that matters, the percentage of the population being vaccinated. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

If the goal of vaccination is to stop the propagation of the virus, all the other possible metrics you cited are irrelevant.

Which shady tactics? Not being 3 months late to place an order?

"the only statistic that matters"

this is the kind of certainty that hides misconceptions and forces biased perspectives.

Your response is consistent with the claim you called a lie. Adding "considering that ..." allows you to hold the EU to an arbitrarily lower standard than the other countries.

I am a EU citizen, my standards are much higher.

EU didn't had to sell their citizens healthcare data to move up the stack (like Israel did). The EU negotiations with these Big Pharma corps made it wait for these 3 countries (Israel, UK and USA). Vaccinations started 1 or 2 months later in EU (depending on country).

A fair comparison would be the data of today in EU with the data from 1 or 2 months ago in those countries (per capita).

But the big questions are:

Why did we have to negotiate vaccines for a global pandemic? Why are countries moving up the stack with Big Pharma? Why is the vaccination rate higher in USA than in Mozambique?

The pharma companies you mention are all working hard to supply a vaccine to purchasers, at cost.

The idea that they have some sort of profit motive and are deliberately delaying the EU is not true. Accounts of journalists, and the companies, suggest EU delayed contracts being signed because of internal disagreements, and haggling over contractual terms.

To be honest, I don't know a thing about this topic. I just found it odd that you seemed to be acknowledging that what you called a lie could actually have been the truth. You still seem to be acknowledge that the EU is facing setbacks.

Why negotiate? Because it's a scarce resource and has to be allocated somehow.

My understanding was, that the delay was mostly because the EU went through a fast track version of the normal certification process while the UK and the US used emergency certifications.

IMHO, it is not important who started first, but about how fast you get to 65+% of vaccinations. I don't have any issue with delays early on, but right now this mixture of political power games, blaming, panic and agenda pushing is risking the whole European vaccination campaign.

> A fair comparison would be the data of today in EU with the data from 1 or 2 months ago in those countries (per capita).

Why is this a fair comparison? Was the EU frozen in time for 1-2 months last year during which they couldn't respond to the virus?

The US effort is also not a singular effort. Each state is basically running their own system.

Comparing USA states to countries is a very common practice of uneducated Americans.

Without bothering to stoop down to the ignorance in your comment, they didn't compare them to countries. They stated that it wasn't a singular effort, which is factually true as far as I can tell and refutes something you said.

In the case of health care, it’s apt because the federal government cannot force states to take actions.

They can only issue guidelines.

That’s due to being a federation. The US is not the only federation; Australia, for example, is one too, and just like the US, in Australia public health is primarily a state responsibility, the federal government provides most of the funding but the states own the public hospitals and control most of the operational decisions. Yet I never heard any Australian compare foreign countries to Australian states. Other federations include Germany, Canada and Mexico, yet I’ve never heard any German or Canadian or Mexican make that comparison either. It seems to be a peculiarly American habit.

Still there are a lot of variables to consider: production, distribution, shares, access, storage, etc...

In comparison to USA states, the European countries are a real mess: lots of small autonomous areas, language barriers everywhere (with some places only speaking particular dialects), hospital networks and management with wild variations (with a crude mix of private / public / semi-private-public / church / volunteer), population distribution with radical variations between country (hey Spain, how are things?), train network that still doesn't quite commute between countries because someone 2 centuries ago said that there might be a war coming anytime soon, etc...

To top all that, countries are much faster in claiming their autonomy than states (they are countries after all). This single fact has big implications in coordinated efforts.

"not that bad" -> more people dying

I don't understand this comment. Could you please expand it in a more constructive way?

Vaccination is not the only way available to stop the spreading of the virus:

  - Keep social distancing
  - Avoid friends and familiar reunions
  - Wash your hands frequently
  - Wear a mask
  - Be careful

The top 5 places with most coronavirus deaths are:

1. USA 2. Brazil 3. Mexico 4. India 5. UK

None of these are in the EU.

That's not even true when looking at deaths per capita (because how is total deaths relevant?) If you remove micro-states, the top 5 in deaths per capita is:

1. Belgium 2. Slovenia 3. UK 4. Czech Republic 5. Italy

4 out of 5 are in the EU.

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Sort by total deaths. It is true. The parent comment did not specify the metric, every death counts and total deaths is a metric that should not to be disregarded.

You are disregarding total deaths, like a robot that only looks at percentages and ratios. These are real people.

If you remove micro-states, if you filter by this, if you only consider that, if you spin this enough, if you consider that this metric is invalid, if you this, if you that...

then what do we have for such a vague claim such as "-> more people dying"?

The parent comment is just saying that a poorly-run vaccination programme results in more deaths than a successful one, everything else being equal. Hope that helps.

In that logic the parent comment disregards the original comparison operands. Innocuous, irrelevant, if not somewhat offensive and disrespectful.

> The EU negotiating team, according to people familiar with the talks, was intent on pushing down the price.

In the middle of a pandemic that is literally costing trillions, this seems like the EU negotiators lost sight of the big picture.

More importantly for a vaccine that is sold at cost, the regional price that the IA got was $3 per dose, the commission stepped in trying to get it down to $2.

Israel is paying $30 for its doses of the Pfizer vaccine and likely a similar amount for Moderna.

If the EU would’ve paid as much as Israel is for 500M doses it would only cost them 15 billion $. That is peanuts in the grand scheme of things, the UK spent 16 billion a month to cover furlough payments ffs...

The US spent quite a lot, but still came in very conservative. The initial orders (combined) of Pfizer/Moderna were enough for 75 million people. Vs likely demand of at least 200 million.

For $40 billion (which we are estimated to lose every 4 or 5 days), we could have ordered 300 million of each of them.

There's likely some materials that are scarce enough not to waste (we need billions of vaccines globally), but production also seems to have started very late in the trial/approval process.

The US bet on many different vaccines, most of which haven't arrived yet, but are still on track. On hindsight we can say we should have bet on Pfizer and Moderna, and screwed the rest - such a bet would have allowed them to increase their supply even faster. However that is hindsight, at the time we didn't have any reason to believe their vaccine would even work at all - while the ones we are waiting on we had good reason to believe would work. That some of the ones we are waiting on seem to be much worse is a shock to everyone. Even this much worse is a qualified - they are doing within the expected range, it is just that mRNA is doing so well that makes them bad.

One other issue with the mRNA vaccines is that they're brand new technology, never before produced in bulk, so except for the vials, most everything is new and we're still climbing the learning curve. The production of DNA using E. Coli isn't new, but everything else is, including how physically fragile the end result is. If you shake a thawed out vial of Pfizer/BioNTech's, you're directed to throw it out, of Moderna's, call them.

And I'd say with the exception of Sanofi/GSK's complete failure with the elderly, and AZ/Oxford's mess, we're getting about the results we should have expected. J&J's ambitious only one dose is not super good, but not bad, on the other hand it's also relatively new technology, which I'm not sure they've ever made in bulk in a hurry. Novavax's 89% is quite fine from a protein plus adjuvant vaccine (Sanofi/GSK's was the same), and uses old technology like Protein Sciences', they should be able to make it quickly, and only requires refrigeration. J&J should be about ready to make a FDA Emergency Use Authorization application, the Phase III US trials for Novavax and J&J's two dose 8 weeks apart are still in progress.

But, yes, in speed to market mRNA is new technology that's very very fast. Moderna literally developed their vaccine candidate over a weekend, although that was based on a lot of their prior work, and others in SARS like coronavirus vaccines. Whereas they had their first batch made in weeks, then had to wait a couple of weeks for the results of sterility tests.

One other issue with the mRNA vaccines is that they're brand new technology, never before produced in bulk

Yes, and bulk production is a serious problem. Handling those fragile pieces of RNA, and getting them inside an encapsulation, is a very touchy process. It involves custom microfluidic components made by, apparently, only one company so far.

Remember, this is a minimum viable product. A few year from now, there will probably be regular bulk production of RNA vaccines. But this was all lab scale until recently.

Once the production problem is solved, making new vaccines will be easier. The encapsulation process doesn't much care what it's encapsulating.

We could have bet 10 times the resources. Cheap compared to the pandemic!

You keep saying this, but you haven't demonstrated any way in which pouring more money into the process would have significantly speeded up production. Do Intel's massive financial resources allow them to profitably manufacture chips on their 10 nm and 7 nm nodes?

Sources? Because everything I've read is that each got a 100 million dose initial order, so that's 100 million people total to begin with. Moderna was already part of Operation Warp Speed, the contract signed 11 August 2020 according to Wikipedia. Pfizer refused to be a part of it, but in July 2020 signed a 100 million dose order contingent on getting regulatory approval. Both have since signed additional 100 million dose contracts, and Moderna an option for an additional 150 million.

Operation Warp Speed worked with Moderna, spent a lot of money on both them and various parts of the supply chain to do the best to manufacture this new type vaccine as fast as possible, and I've not heard anything about their failing in their promises. Whereas Pfizer initially went it alone, and starting in December has been failing to keep their promises everywhere, now even shutting down their plant in Belgium to increase capacity.

Yeah, I appear to have misunderstood or misremembered something, the Moderna order was 100 million doses.

It's very hard to evaluate whether they have proceeded on the fastest possible timeline scaling up the production. Which whether their goals were ambitious enough is just as important as whether they are hitting them.

> the regional price that the IA got was $3 per dose, the commission stepped in trying to get it down to $2.

Meanwhile in France, I can do a RT-PCR test paid by the state (around 50$ AFAIK) every other day with no question asked.

My understanding is that the rich countries like France were willing to do a deal on day 1, but the commission stepped in to negotiate for everyone

Having all countries in the EU in the same boat when it comes to vaccines seems like a good thing to me. Now we have this spat between the EU and UK, but if every nation in the EU negotiated by themselves we might have a conflict between EU countries themselves... That's not to say the EU didn't screw up along the way.

They could have wanted to pay that much but that does not mean that the vaccines would have been there in that quantity. Much easier to fill Israel's order at that price than Europe's at the same price or even a higher one.

The teams in the UK and EU were led by two seasoned professionals, an EU trade negotiator, & in the UK a VC (as controversial as that is). The outcomes summarise the personalities of the two involved.

Success for a negotiator is the cheapest cost. Success for a VC is return on investment. Both won spectacularly on their own fronts.

I was under the assumption that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was being produced at cost under the agreement with Oxford University. I'm curious as to what cost savings they were after - possibly on distribution or in establishing the manufacturing bases?

It is, but there are still regional price differences due to labor, manufacturing and supply chain costs.

However trying to get a $3 vaccine down to $2 is laughable for what is essentially the wealthiest trading block on the planet, even their poorest member could afford to cover the entire union.

To be precise, it’s the government forcing business to close that is costing trillions. The vast majority are not in the risk group at all, and would had continued to provide value if they could. Instead, we see economic shutdown and governments speeding QE up to the next level to keep markets afloat by inflation. Smells like Weimar but with smartphones

I assume literally the entire job of the negotiating team is to negotiate the price down. If their job isn't to negotiate the price down, what are the negotiators hired for?

If they are just going to take the market price, there doesn't need to be a negotiation team. Just let companies sell the vaccine to whoever at whatever price.

They didn't lose sight of the big picture, they did what they were there to do.

The job of negotiation is to get a good deal for all. Price is only one part of that - if you only focus on price bad things happen. too low a price and the supplier goes out of business before you get all the product. Too low a price and your supplier doesn't have enough profit to remain in business for the next time you need something. Too low a price and the supplier won't negotiate with you at all next time you need something.

Of course too high a price has issues as well. It is important to pay attention to price. Sometimes you need to break away from a deal because it will never work out.

Long term the best deals are win-win.

A negotiation can be for anything: it could be to include additional safe-guards in the contract for example...

You could even negotiate a higher price in exchange for something more valuable (for example, paying extra per vaccine in exchange for building more capacity sooner...)

A "Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sends negotiators to get highest vaccine price worldwide!" headline would be even worse for the negotiators political career than "[She seeks] to Duck Responsibility". They aren't going to negotiate higher prices on a vaccine in a global emergency.

Why not? Israel did just that, they offered double the US price for their doses + full access to the medical data.

They vaccinated half their population whilst the EU is stuck making a surprised Pikachu face.

Fast, good, cheap. Pick two.

Their job is to make the appropriate choices. In this situation cheap is not a priority due to the costs of delay.

It's not just a vaccine disaster, it is a COVID disaster. The response to COVID in most of the developed world was a completely fuck up. We are still learning lessons that should have been learned a year ago, and there are still people everywhere - here too - that believe the best way to tackle a crisis of this magnitude is to stick your head in the sand and to pretend it isn't happening.

I've definitely lost the illusion that mankind is able to rise to the challenge as a whole species, in spite of our smarts and our ability to communicate. Some of us will, and some of us won't, the winners will be the ones that adapt rapidly.

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed.

Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.

That's the number with restrictions, lockdowns, curfews, etc, etc. In other words while Serbia was hit fairly badly, relatively speaking, the mitigation measures largely worked. This is not a good argument against mitigation measures.

The Spanish Flu seems to have similar case mortality rates and efforts to implement preventive measures were hampered by the war time conditions so it's a good candidate to compare against when considering the effectiveness of preventive measures. It's spread lead to from 17x to 50x as many deaths as we've seen from the coronavirus at the global level. In India where lockdown measures weren't significant 5% of the population died.

No, mitigation measures have had no effect:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

etc. And there are many more.

I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but lockdowns have had no impact on mortality. This is seen when examining all the data. Consider Sweden - very little government suppression, and it's got a basically average outcome. In fact when analysed properly they don't have much excess death in 2020:

https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...

Romanian death rate per 1000 (8th highest in the world) has increased monotonically from 12.7 in 2015 by 0.1/1000 each year to 13.2 in 2020. In other words Covid has had zero effect (to one significant place) on the increase in rate of death per 1000. However to claim Covid has not been a disaster is disingenuous. On many fronts it's been a calamity though much of this has been self-inflicted.

What I believe Covid proven, at least in Serbia, is that you can’t have hospitals built 50 years ago serve almost double population of Belgrade. It shows how politicians didn’t invest in healthcare.

In my mind, the whole thing is so overblown because the medical sector works on fumes. Doctors and nurses are working in Germany, and our hospital are few and far between.

We have thousands of young and educated leaving the country every year.

That’s the real tragedy.

However, this is not to say I’m against measures. I wear a mask, I social distance, I haven’t seen my friends in months.

It's not much different in neighbouring countries. Don't know about Slovenia or Croatia but the same issues plague Romania and Bulgaria. Just Thursday night there was yet another fire at a hospital in Bucharest and another four victims.

Any source for those 2020 numbers? Afaik the Romanian Statistics Institute only published mortality figures up to (and including) November 2020, and the nominal numbers were indeed similar to Serbia’s, i.e. up until then we had had about 10% more deaths in the first 11 months of the year compared to the first 11 months of 2019 (with November 2020 a particular dire month).

It’s also true that I couldn’t find an easy comparison with the previous 5 years average.

Serbia is actually doing pretty well. Both in controlling Covid and vaccination.

Take a look at their cases and deaths. Unlike many countries in Serbia you are actually recommended to visit a doctor when you have any signs of Covid and not wait for severe symptoms. They established separate small Covid centres. Take a closer look at how they are handling this. Pretty interesting.

In Sweden the death rate during 2020 was equal to the average for the last 10 years. We had zero restrictions until a couple of months ago.

  No - it wasn't, head over to EuroMomo and you'll find out that it was over[0]. Not only that, compare the excess mortality with your neighbors and the "Sweden did fine without lockdowns" sounds hollow. That would explain the restrictions.

  Consider that the excess mortality is just a small indicator that things didn't go well - if you plug in the equation a reduction of deaths due to other causes you figure out pretty quickly that things were pretty bad.

[0] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

Thank you - I appreciate a correction with sources. I had based my understanding on a report by the Swedish government central statistics bureau, that stated no excess deaths in 2020 on average, but an increase in Q1-Q2 and decrease in Q3-Q4. (Can dig up a link if anyone is interested).

It is also clear from your link that deaths was unaffected by government forcing lockdowns. Lockdowns certainly do have an effect on freedom and economics though - creating a huge dependence on hand outs for millions, and a lost year of youth for a generation.

In your link it’s clear there was two minor bumps - “Low excess”.

Still, it was good to retain relative freedom throughout the year. My friends in DK and NO live in fear - a friends mother doesn’t leave the apartment for a year, friends lost each other, thousands of lovers never met, weddings not happening, and massive unemployment (doesn’t affect HN tech workers who can humblebrag about getting take out food).

The grandparent's original point still stands, this is not the disaster that the headlines portray. The U.S stands at 1 in 750 people dead from covid, mostly elderly with comorbidities, a rate similar to many other countries.

That is 0.13% of the population. That's not 1 in 10, or even 1 in 100. It's not the young and healthy, either. A pretty small number. And if you are old and frail something is going to get you soon, anyways.

Per-capita just as many, perhaps several times more, people died of the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

New viruses happen, part of nature, people die, that's how it goes, This isn't nearly as bad as a lot of similar situations in the past.

> if you plug in the equation a reduction of deaths due to other causes you figure out pretty quickly that things were pretty bad.

This is pure speculation.

See https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.27.21250604v... . There's excess mortality of 9000 people, over 10 times Finland's (and infinitely higher than Norway which has about 0 excess mortality).

The real disaster is yet to come, and it will be economical and caused by the prolonged lockdowns.

Not to mention the third world starving, but it's not like western countries ever cared about that.

The US has been consistently providing 50% or more of the world's food aid for a century at this point. It has saved tens of millions of people from starvation over that time. No western countries eh.

We produce more than enough food for everyone on the planet (even if we were 10bln), the United Nation's World Food Program, whose mission is to "eradicate hunger", in 60 years just managed to get bigger and bigger (15k employees nowadays) without solving the problem.

The number of undernourished people is higher today than in 2014.

Poor countries don't get industrialised and never manage to make enough food by themselves.

If you ask me, I think it's just a way to spend some money to make your citizens feel good while keeping the status-quo.

Only 12%? More than 1/10 of your population dies, literally more than a decimation by its old meaning, saying that this is not such a disaster is incredibly unempathetic. Or you have a very warped view of what consists a disaster...

No, In Sweden 1144 out of every million people have died [0], which equates to 1 out of every 874 people.

Does 1 out of 874 people dead, mostly elderly and/or with comorbidities, sound bad?

Picture a room with 874 people. That's a lot of people. Ask 1 person to leave. Is that a disaster for society?

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

I think the answer to that is: “Are you the one person?”

And the person is already on the way out.

12% of the population? No, surely what's meant is an increase of 12% to the usual number of deaths per year.

You are confusing "12% more than the prior 5 year average" with "12% of the overall population".

Nevertheless, I agree it's a catastrophe.

I think you misread the comment your replying to. He said the difference between average deaths per year and 2020 deaths per year was 12%. Likely this will balance out with a lower death rate in the next year, as the old and weak who would have died in 2021 sadly left this world already a year early.

He's not saying 12% of the population, he's saying 12% more then the running 5 year average.

I think humanity (as a species) is able to overcome situations like this, but not without large loss of life (and potentially setback in culture, technology, society). So I wouldn't be too concerned about humanity, just about our current civilization.

Yes humanity has suffered and survived far worse than COVID-19, even if you imagine that nothing at all had been done to mitigte it.

We all intrinsically knew what to expect from and how to react to a pandemic. I honestly believe intentional misinformation from the Trump administration caused the massive bifurcation in dealing with this problem with a united front. Asian countries did not have this problem, and look at how much better they are faring.

Everybody thought it would fizzle out, like sars-cov1 years before. Nobody in North America or Europe wanted to shut down the economy on a possible threat they were not sure would happen.

The only countries that were ready for covid19 were the ones who got hit significantly by sars-cov1.

1 in 750 people have died, mostly elderly and./or with comorbidities. 0.13%. Hardly a social catastrophe. A lot of people think the world has grossly overreacted. These are in democracies so their opinions count, too.

That was due to the lessons from SARS-Cov1 in 2003. Asian countries that did not suffer from SARS-Cov1 did very badly with covid-19. e.g. India. In India the misinformation was uniquely Indian - first they said that vegetarians will not get Covid, it came from bushmeat (ignoring the fact that human-to-human transmission was through cough droplets), then they said that Yoga fights Covid, then they blamed it on a minority gathering (ignoring the fact that people were streaming in unchecked through international airports through all of January and February 2020).

One of the lessons taught in "crisis management", it seems, is to downplay an emergency so that the people do not panic. Death due to ignorance is much preferable?

Looking at WorldOMeters covid data shows India ranks 105th in deaths per million(lower ranking is worse). India has one wave peaking in September and now relatively low cases.

Let's not get into the testing data debate here. To say that a country with 0.53 hospital beds per 1000 persons can successfully handle any medical emergency is unrealistic[1]. India is also highly populated, so the sheer number of people without access to healthcare is enormous. Access to testing is non-uniform. Very strangely, only places with relatively better access to healthcare seem to have more cases - Delhi, Bombay, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, the state of Kerala, etc.

Kind of like how 80 percent of dinosaurs are from the US and Europe - you only find things if you look. Ignorance is bliss.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospital_...

India did way better than a lot of other countries, Lot of people expected it to do way worse.

>>>> first they said that vegetarians will not get Covid, it came from bushmeat (ignoring the fact that human-to-human transmission was through cough droplets)

This was at the point when WHO was saying there was no Human to Human transfmission.

>>> then they blamed it on a minority gathering

Well obviously since even during lockdown, they conducted that gathering which had people coming from almost all states, then after the gathering went back to their home states. This was during the height of lockdown. The problem was that people though t rules did not apply to them. There was even a riot in Bangalore by these people when lockdown was being imposed.

India just doesn't have the giant 70+ yo vulnerable male population that western countries have. If they did, the numbers would be horrifying. But since they have a young population, herd immunity was reached. (Serology tests show over 50% of india had covid, and the case stats show a classic epidemical curve)

Same goes for Russia btw, theres no 50+ males for covid to kill as they die to alcohol abuse. So they peaked at "only" 600 deaths / day.

India did badly for the same reason the US and Brazil did so badly. Authoritarian, right wing, populist governments that relied on misinformation and half truths, had no plan and basically shifted blame and tried to save face. India actually probably did the best out of all three considering Modi at least isn’t a science denialist.

True, the last part did surprise me. He went against the base of his party, and espoused science.

My long term observation of humanity is most people try to solve every problem with whatever strategy that's been working for them. Vs anything practical and appropriate.

Authoritarian, right wing, populist governments tried bullshitting and gaslighting to combat the virus.

Me I'm an introverted hermit. Been working well so far.

> I honestly believe intentional misinformation from the Trump administration caused the massive bifurcation in dealing with this problem with a united front.

Not everything is about America, you know? We in Europe made our mistakes on our own. Also the epidemic hit parts of Europe before it arrived to USA.

What's most hilarious about this situation is that the EU getting cheaper vaccines than the UK was advertised as a major "Aha you shouldn't have left, see?" a month ago, but now the UK has already vaccinated almost as many people as the entire EU.

Both the EU and its member countries fucked up so badly there aren't words strong enough to describe it. Reminds me of last spring when EU countries were blocking exports of medical supplies to eachothers. The EU appears weaker than ever with the corona crisis ; political cohesion between countries is low, economics are bad, and there's going to be a lot of resentment among the population.

I agree with your interpretation but disagree with your framing. To me such expensive errors are tragic not 'hilarous'.

I am very sad about the distress and suffering this saga will cause Europeans.

>First, U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech informed Brussels that it would be delivering far less vaccine than planned in the coming weeks.

Which country isn't impacted by this?

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

It's helpful ro quantify different countries' vaccination rates.

Current doses per hundred people (selected countries, 29 Jan)

- Israel 53.5

- UK 12.3

- USA 8.4

- EU 2.6

- Spain 3.2

- Italy 3.0

- Germany 2.7

- France 2.0

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

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

That is completely off topic.

It's really bad in itself, but not related to vaccinations in any way.

Correlating them is an Ad Hominem (ad institutum?) at best, and a libel at worst.

By correlating those, politicians and 'alternative' media are using the (proven right) distrust for testing to distrust for vaccinations. That is disingenuous and dangerous.

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

Basically the EU was and still is being naive. USA and UK hoard production, while EU is seeing the stock go away.

Maybe it's time to play the same type of ball game, level the play field, and lock all exports of vaccines until orders are leveled to the deadlines established.

A redacted version of the EU-AstraZeneca contract has been made public since the article was written:

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-europe...

It's not clear to me but it seems that the EU wants AstraZeneca to use some additional factories in the UK that they're not currently using (?).

Just saw this—the contract has been posted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25960469

As far as I see, some people are questioning why EU didn't prefer Chinese or Russian vaccines. I know only one of the Chinese vaccines: CoronaVac (developed by Sinovac)

We still don't have clear phase 3 results. The announced results (by Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia) are so different. It is not easy to trust it at the moment.

BUT WE ALREADY VACCINATED ALMOST TWO MILLIONS IN TURKEY :D

So the real results are coming... Just wait a couple of weeks more.

Why should we need Chinese or Russian vaccines if a large part of other vaccine production is being made in Europe?

Basically USA and UK are hoarding their production and EU production, and EU are fulfilling orders for other parts of the world and not enough for itself - this doesn't seem balanced and EU should act swiftly to stop this bullshit.

The Sputnik V vaccine is by my count the 3rd to have solid and successful Phase III trial results, in December whereas the more modern technology mRNA vaccines got that in November. In 20/20 hindsight where we now know Sanofi/GSK failed hard in their first attempt, and one of of Sputnik V's virus vector doses is being tried with AZ/Oxford to improve efficacy, it would have been a very good idea to also place a bet on it, and following their business model set up one or more production facilities in the EU. Although given how AZ/Oxford's four late in the game EU factories have the very worst productivity of all of their's, would not for a while make a difference.

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

More Dublin than Belfast?

All parties up north responded in the same way to Dublin?

I wonder if this will become a watershed moment for the EU.

I've always been an ardent believer in the European program, both for historical reasons (I have French and German grand parents), but also because for all its warts, I believed the EU had a competent bureaucracy, able to go above the pettyness of national politics. French politicians of all side love scapegoating EU for their own failures.

To say that the current situation shattered that conviction would be an understatement. I have no admiration for the Trump administration, but they objectively did almost everything better.

It is also amusing and tragic to see all the core countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, etc.) all doing badly. They cannot frame this as a "cultural" or national failure of specific country like in 2011 at the peak of "Greek" crisis. And 2021 may well be worse than 2020 in number of life affected as populations are tired of various movement constraints, new virus strains coming up, etc.

[edit] my comment comparing US vs the EU was about vaccines, not about the COVID handling in general. For the latter, comparing policies and impact is much harder.

[edit 2] On #deaths, most countries in the EU and Europe in general did not do that much better than the US: France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands all have around ~0.08 - 0.12 % of their population that died from the disease (quite worse for Belgium). And Germany will likely reach that range as well.

The US has twice the per capita covid deaths as Germany. Great success right there, hurrah!

Germany's death rate since the fall is higher than the US though. The US largely bungled the initial response, where as Europe seems to have bungled the ongoing problem.

> Germany's death rate since the fall is higher than the US though.

That is, if you actually trust the latest data coming out of the US, which could be a very misleading thing to do [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...

I do trust the latest data coming out of the US. Why wouldn't I? Even if the CDC no longer counts cases (which I think this was reversed) you'd have to say thousands upon thousands of nurses/doctors/hospitals were all lying and pro-Trump, which is conspiratorial nonsense.

Case counts in every country are likely under-counted, but the death rates relative to counted cases is likely very accurate.

More than anything else that appears to be lack of timing. European and USA rates have generally evened out.

The virus don’t care what country you’re in.

>The virus don’t care what country you’re in.

Except New Zealand. Virus really hates that place.

Germany is not at all representative of the rest of Europe. Have a look at Belgium, Italy, etc.

And the US also has a way lower population density.

The EU fails yet again to handle a crisis. It's great at some things (gdpr) which are slow burners... But when having to make quick decisions the cracks start to show. Being a Brit I do hope they come through this ok because I feel the world needs the EU.

> but they objectively did almost everything better.

Sure, if you ignore everything else they didn't. Even restricting the discussion to COVID, the reason why a lot more people have, are and will be getting infected (and die) is because for most of the year Trump didn't treat it as a pandemic. All those stupid things he said on Twitter and to the press throughout the year about the pandemic, all of that have real life consequences, consequences that we will still be dealing with at least for the rest of 2021. It's hard enough to convince most of the population to follow pandemic procedures without having the leader of the country constantly say stupid things. Now it seems impossible.

The Trump administration spewed misinformation from day one that caused massive dissonance in dealing with the problem. Saying they did better when they had literally no plan and let 400,000 people die is incredible dissembling and most likely a political statement than a logical one. They literally dissuaded people from using masks.

A lot of people in our democracy might not agree with your assessment of this pandemic. A lot of people feel that 1 in 750 people dying, mostly older with comorbidities, is not the disaster for society that some seem to think it is. A lot of people think that giving up a year or two of their social and economic lives is not worth trying to avoid a 1 in 750, or 0.13%, chance of dying. Especially those, like the young, who have less than 1 in 100,000 chance of dying.

Trying to tell them this is a catastrophe based on the numbers isn't going to work.

Where did we come up with 0.13%? Approximately 0.3% of everybody in NYC died of COVID-19 so that's the lower bound assuming everyone in NYC was infected (and they weren't, of course).

I took 1347 deaths per million people in the U.S. [0] and did the division.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

More people die the less you control the spread of the virus, the overall death rate at this point in time is not a good gauge of the potential impact of the pandemic.

But we live in democracies, and there are a lot of people who feel differently than you might. Not just Trump. They look at the same numbers and dangers and don't agree.

Besides, the authority and responsibility to respond to a pandemic (issue health orders, closings, quarantines, and lock downs) rests with the states and not the president or congress.

EDIT: removed a remark about Fauci and herd immunity, I thought I read this but couldn't find a reference. My apologies.

“Literally no plan”? How did you arrive at that conclusion? Even the most cursory effort would tell you it’s not true.

What was the plan? Other than "let the states handle it". Which is the same as "no plan".

Right now a lot of people are getting vaccinated - an unprecedented achievement. Did that happen by magic? That’s one example that a federal plan existed, and there are plenty of others if you care to look for yourself.

It’s been 12 months now since the US banned flights from China. A lot has happened since then. People can differ on whether the federal plan was a good one (I happen to believe it wasn’t very good), but to believe there was no plan at all is just mental self-harm.

True, but if Americans are being vaccinated more than EU now, is mainly because of him.

Not at all, it’s because the states are doing what they can inspire of no federal strategy.

Only adjacent to this: am i wrong to think that in many places this lack of available vaccines in a predictable manner is leading to a staggered immunization and (unneeded?) delay of effective mass immunization?

I mean: if you waited to stockpile large enough quantities first, you'd then be able to apply the vaccines quicker (given right logistics and man power) speeding up heard imunity. Am I wrong?

Wouldn't this accumulation strategy make more sense even if it's harder to apply?

I ask because it's clear that vaccination has become so political everywhere that govs are rushing to "start immunization" while not being able to garantee a sustainable rate of vaccinations.

afaik these vaccines, once administered, have a long-lasting effect.

It shouldn't matter then whether the same amount is applied all at once or little by little. But the latter approach has the benefit of some protection earlier.

Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, but in conclusion, there should be no social health benefit in deliberately delaying vaccination.

Assumption is "more vaccinated -- better outcome" which is not proven yet.

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

Israel has a population of 9 million, if you only have 2 million vaccinated and people stop acting like it's a risk then of course the cases are going to go through the roof.

If you have 6 million vaccinated, across the whole population not just old people, then you will see a decrease as the chances are that the people you meet will not be a vector.

Until then, act like you are infected.

We need to approve (or start trail programs of) vaccines from Russia, China, India.

And we need to put export controls on EU-produced vaccines just as the US has.

But we Europeans are too politically disorganised to do this and thus we loose out in particular to the US.

The EU at a political level has been an absolute disaster through the Corona crises, from the lack of support of Italy when the virus initially hit, to uncoordinated petty tit-for-tat border closures, to now this failure of vaccine purchases.

I still don’t understand why EU did not consider the Chinese and Russian vaccines.

Very populous countries are getting them and any distrust towards the reporting of these vaccines could have been scrutinized(Turkey run its own "stage 3" on the Chinese one, got its own numbers and is inspecting the deliveries for 2 weeks before vaccinating the population).

Now we have this situation where EU is lagging behind very seriously and the allied countries say that they should have signed better contracts.

Okay, do your thing on TikTok and Huawei businesses in your trade war but not even considering buying vaccines from them then being left behind and and arguing on contract technicalities is not OK.

Presumably because (despite your point about customer countries doing their own testing) China and Russia are undemocratic and authoritarian regimes which are not trusted to produce a vaccine that has been properly tested in a fully accountable way.

That is not to doubt their scientific prowess, but the ability of their science to avoid gross political interference.

Neither is it to imply the West are angels, but comparatively China and Russia are not subject to the same democratic oversight.

>Presumably because (despite your point about customer countries doing their own testing) China and Russia are undemocratic and authoritarian regimes which are not trusted to produce a vaccine that has been properly tested in a fully accountable way.

That's the last thing they care about (if it's even in the list). For one, we could easily verify the vaccines of those countries with independent testing here or there, we don't have to "trust" their development method and testing.

Not to mention we seemed to have no problem trusting their drugs and vaccines (Chinese ones) for decades. Suddenly we don't?

It's the trade war with China and the pressure on Russia (to just give in and open up to western companies/demands like in the Yeltsin era).

The rest are excuses for gullible citizens.

> I still don’t understand why EU did not consider the Chinese and Russian vaccines.

Politics, that's pretty much it.

For months now people have been indoctrinated that nothing good could ever come out of China or Russia.

A lot of that facilitated by misleading headlines about how their vaccines were supposedly "rushed" and somehow disregarding approval processes, as if that wasn't happening pretty much everywhere.

A narrative that solely rests on embezzling the fact that there is no global authority on pharma approval, every country sets up their own rules.

Throw in some really sensationalized and misleading headlines about how they supposedly force people to be guinea pigs for their vaccines, and both of these vaccines have become so toxic, publicity wise, that even considering them would be a political death sentence in many Western countries.

This is a political suicide in many countries+ the likelihood of people wanting to take it may be on the lower side.

This. Singapore, an ethnically Chinese country, has announced they're buying Moderna, BioNTech and (Chinese) Sinovac, and approximately nobody trusts or wants to take the Chinese one.

Exactly. I have some friends in Singapore and the gov’t said “everyone will get a vaccine but you won’t have a choice as to which one you get”.

Since they stand a better than 1/3 chance of getting SinoVac (since the other two will be reserved for the elderly as they have strong data) a lot of them are planning to delay getting vaccinated until more is known about SinoVac.

I'm in Venezuela and we're apparently only getting the Russian vaccine. I haven't met the first person that says they're willing to get it.

It's definitely not a "political suicide" in Europe, in the sense that people have political objections to that.

It is a political suicide in the sense that the political establishment will punish those that opt for it, however.

I’m sure dying off and keeping businesses shut will be huge political win when the allies return to normal.

Everyone will appreciate the bad contract and simply not make big deal out of it. Take a knee for the western alliance.

When we are on it, we should also ban Xiaomi and TikTok.

China literally runs concentration camps for some of their citizens. If that's how they treat citizens, why should foreigners expect good treatment?

We won’t have to live in China, we will consume the vaccines like we consume the iPhones.

But you inject the vaccine into your body.

Remember the melamine in baby formula scandal? To this day, many Chinese parents are still buying formula from abroad.

>I still don’t understand why EU did not consider the Chinese and Russian vaccines.

Because they care for politics and diplomacy plays (and playing second fiddle to American rivarly with these countries), not for the citizens...

This highlights one issue I've had with calls to secure more vaccine in the US and elsewhere. Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production - everyone has been making purchasing agreements and everyone knows that everybody is going to need it.

These pushes to outbid other countries might go toward funding additional capacity for the next pandemic, but these corporations didn't have enough warning to know that they were the ones that'd need to make this investment so, for the moment, all of these countries securing additional doses are securing them out of the pockets of other countries.

> Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production

I was under the assumption that Project Warp Speed explicitly directed funding from the US government to help ramp up production while vaccines were still being tested. Did that not happen?

It did happen. But mRNA vaccines are new. The capacity needed to be built all along the supply chain. Months isn't a lot of time when you're talking about building new brick and mortar procduction infrastructure.

It did, it just wasn't ambitious enough. There were separate grants, but the preorders were only enough to cover the entire population if multiple vaccines were approved.

I guess it is possible that production was scaled up as fast as possible, but it seems that there was a lack of imagination in the planning process (setting low goals, not anticipating far enough ahead, etc).

From the now taken down Operation Warp Speed page, see here https://web.archive.org/web/20210119000857/https://www.hhs.g... 300 million doses from AZ, 100 million from Novavax, as mentioned in my other comment 100 million from Pfizer, 100 million from Sanofi/GSK which as mentioned failed, and a 100 million from Johnson and Johnson.

Also mentions we signed the second 100 million dose contract with Moderna December 11th, that would be based their results which led to their submitting their application for an FDA Emergency Use Authorization on November 30th. See also lots of details on supply chain spending, well over a billion dollars.

So while you're technically correct, with how much effort it takes to ramp up production, see how Johnson and Johnson isn't going to meet their early 12 million dose promise, I don't see our general approach as being wrong. Signing multiple 700 million dose contracts would not in any way speed production, that only happens when you get an initial contract and start making it. Which is exactly what Moderna and Pfizer did, quite some time before getting EUAs, lots of doses were shipped within days. Where I live, for Pfizer the Monday after the FDA's Friday issuance of an EUA. To a hospital which had rented an ultra-cold freezer to store it, a lot of work and money has gone into this hole process.

I know this is the party line right now but it’s nothing more then Joe Biden is doing his best to set low expectations and to revamp history.

I’m a committed never Trumper. But there’s no question that warp speed has been a insane success. Biden set at the bar as low as warp speed was already achieving.

There are 1 million valid reasons to hate Trump. This might be the only reason to think his government did a reasonable job at one task.

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