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Comment by oli5679 | Hacker News Reader

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'.

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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...

Your article is blocked for me because I'm not a subscriber.

I read this one, and Pfizer use of Israel medical data seems reasonable to me although worth being cautious about this type of thing.

There are other examples (UK, US, UAE) that are not taking this data sharing approach and it didn't hinder the process. This doesn't seem too related to EU vaccine woes to me.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news...

Here is the title of the article you couldn't read:

"Israel moves to head of vaccine queue, offering Pfizer access to country’s health-care database"

Guess who stayed bellow on the vaccine queue?

From the press reporting it seems that the EU was the source of delay. UK and US had no data sharing. The Israeli data sharing is because both parties want more granular information on the vaccine's effictiveness over time and by age and other health demographics. It has nothing to do with the speed at which the delivery was agreed, as evidenced by the numerous other agreements signed without such programs with US and UK.

"Meanwhile, the Commission’s negotiations with producers of mRNA vaccines were dragging on. COVID-19 didn’t just lend urgency to the negotiations: Talks were held virtually, adding an intangible complication. Austria’s Clemens Martin Auer, the chair of the member country steering board for the negotiations, remarked in late August that he had still never actually met Gallina in person — though he was by then a committed fan.

Talks with American companies, especially Pfizer and Moderna, proved especially thorny: Both reopened aspects of the contracts that had already been determined when the companies, in the view of the Commission official close to the negotiations, thought they had a bit more leverage."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/europe-...

You should stop spreading misinformation. The agreement Israel signed doesn't allow Pfizer any access to the "country's health-care database". That's complete nonsense. Nor is there anything even remotely "shady" or "undemocratic" about it.

Israel will provide Pfizer daily aggregate data that contains no identifiable health information (as defined by the Israeli Patient’s Rights Law), or any data that may result in the identification of individuals.

The signed agreement is publicly available, is under the oversight of Israel's Helsinki committee, and is in full compliance with Israeli law. Any citizen who believes their rights are being infringed upon, can petition to the Supreme Court of Israel.

The reason Israel was able to reach such an agreement, and the EU wasn't, is because Israel, given enough vaccines, will be able to vaccinate its entire adult population by the end of March, whereas the EU isn't even close to having such capacity, regardless of vaccine access.

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.

It's a government that was tasked with procuring vaccines, and has done a worse job.

I don't see any inherent constraint preventing them for agreeing contacts under the same terms, approving vaccines reviewing the same analysis and distributing using the same logistical processes as the UK and USA.

They had the same information and access to funds as other programs, and failed to effectively prepare and execute an adequate plan.

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