EU vaccine rollout severely lags behind
statista.com
statista.com
Anyway, you can interpret this in a postivie way: the EU is trying to be good and is sharing its vaccinations more or less fairly with other countries (for now). However, you can also see it as the EU has no real power at all and is just an easy target to get fooled over by other countries..
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-eu-not-ready-to-share-covi...
Whichever country is contractually at the front of the line will have their order fulfilled first/according to the terms of the contracts.
The EU wasted months negotiating lower prices and then took longer with approvals.
There is no good guy or bad guy (at least until the UK or EU blocks exports preventing execution of the private contracts - at that point the country blocking the exports becomes the bad guy).
The US used the national defense production act to block any export of BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine produced in the US to other countries, so no, this is not just "These vaccine deals are with private companies who produce their product around the world." - countries can and do influence these deals if it benefits them. UK did the same thing.
Don’t conflate the ability to negotiate carefully with banning exports. The private company AZ signed a contract with the British govt according to which they can export once they have delivered the agreed doses to the U.K. the faster they deliver on their commitments, the faster they can start exporting. No one forced them to sign the deal and no one in the UK is banning exports of the vaccine.
This is false. The DPA was invoked in order to a) block the export of certain raw materials in order to prioritise local production of vaccines and b) to compel drugmaker Merck to help produce its competitor Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine.[1] It does not block the export of vaccines. The White House clarified this last week as well.
[1] https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2021/03/02/biden-administrati...
Tell that to Canada. They were securing doses from day one and still suffered from delayed shipments and now have to contend with countries of manufacture forbidding export. What really pisses me off is that the US Gov had 30 million doses of Astra for several months and it it isn't even approved for use. Why hoard it when you can save lives in other countries while you have no intention of using it soon if ever? Sure they might get their approval in May or June but by then I expect the other manufacturers to have ramped up to cover everyone everywhere.
There might be perfectly valid reasons for this- I am not sure to what extent the government could or would want to force it to fast-track.
Canada put all their eggs in the CanSino vaccine even though they knew they had a bad relationship with China. This summer China conveniently blocked all progress and Canada was left scrambling. Blame Trudeau not the US.
The drugmaker must apply for emergency use authorization before it can't be approved in the first place. They still have not applied for EUA as of today.
On the other hand the UK still has a fully nationalised health service which means that it was in a much better position to be able to scale the vaccinations. That's probably the real reason that they're ahead.
Give it another 10 years of Tory rule and they'll "catch down" to the rest of the world.
So it is simultaneously true that they signed a contract within a few days of each other, but also not quite the full picture.
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...
The conclusion, at least as I interpret it, is that both the UK and the EU can reasonably claim to have priority, based on their respective contracts, but that the UK did a better job than the EU in making theirs enforceable. Hence, AstraZeneca has prioritised them, while the EU has been forced to resort to political rather than legal measures to attempt redress (publishing the contract, export controls, etc.). And the UK's closer ties to the AstraZeneca vaccine project likely did mean they started work on the UK supply chain somewhat earlier than in the EU, even although the final contracts were signed essentially simultaneously (one day apart).
I honestly don't really see this as an affair with clear good guys and bad guys, but it seems like most people are determined to do so, and inevitably along the lines of their pre-existing sympathies.
Similarly - the NHS is great, but not unique. Norway for example has a system akin to the NHS (and so do many EU countries) and there's no correlation there. Norway is waaaaay behind the UK and the US. Again, it seems unlikely that the NHS is the cause.
It's obvious you hate the Tories, but that shouldn't cloud your judgment to such a degree that you fail to celebrate the real achievement of the UK's vaccination rate.
According to Dominic Cummings recent select committee hearing, the vaccine programme was largely built outside/adjacent to any existing NHS processes. It was given NHS branding for public trust reasons (just like the new-from-the-ground-up Track and Trace endeavour).
EU doesn't have problems with vaccination but with supply of vaccines, we use up all we can get (at least until AZ issues, now people are afraid to vaccinate with it).
There are many (all?) countries in EU that have health service nationalised in EU. The only country I know that doesn't is US.
If it nationalized the factories, or seized supply it hadn't ordered, I might consider it the bad guy. But irrespective of who gets the vaccines first, the EU has already bought the some portion of the supply.
I understand that viewpoint but feel like the long term consequences politically would be too high. We live in a globalised world where most of the richest countries do little of their own manufacturing. If we start blocking exports in times of crisis the foundations of that system would be damaged.
Nationalization etc. happens on the national level only.
The UK purchased right of first refusal on the first 100million doses of Oxford/AZ produced in the UK factories that they funded.
The EU also funded factories (in the EU) but did not purchase right of first refusal only best efforts contracts.
The USA has a full ban on exports till they are ready to export.
The UK is not blocking exports. The EU were free to conclude contracts with the (not very productive) UK manufacturers at the same time HM government was doing so.
nope, the UK and the US have a "first us, then the rest" policy for exports, that the EU does not.
https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/01/26/news/interview_...
Instead, there are multiple steps along the way, that matter much more than some singular data point of a very long contract process that has many stages.
Of course I don't know the accuracy of such statements. But if that is true, you could certainly argue it would unfair that the EU should benefit from production capacity that only exists because of commitments made by the UK, and the location of the factories is fairly irrelevant to that.
You could counter argue that I am mistakenly treating the "EU" and "UK" as a single individual person each who deserves to suffer the consequences of their actions, when in fact the people suffering are individual citizens who had almost no control over the negotiation process. But, on the flip side, if companies cannot rely on agreements made during difficult negotiations to be honoured then it will be harder to secure such agreements in future.
Solid plan, solid procurement strategy. But after that procurement, nothing. No coordination of national campaigns with manufacturers, no planning on local and regional level, no operational procurement plan. And the list goes on.
We need some massive reforms and rebuilding after this. There already was a lot of EU scepticism, and instead of taking this opportunity to shine, they completely squandered it and destroyed trust.
Forgive me for picking on this, but I see it regularly come up whenever the deficit of democracy in the EU is discussed and I completely disagree with that assessment.
The President of the US is not elected by "the people". The PMs of most countries are invited to form a government by the head of state, not directly by the people. This is a common feature in many democracies, executive roles are not directly elected and are instead picked based on support by parliamentary majorities. The President of the European Commission is elected by the Parliament, which is itself elected directly by the people of the EU. I see absolutely no problem there.
There are other things which deserve more attention, like the disproportionate amount of power the Council has vis a vis the Commission and the Parliament.
Just like in the UK where the PM is elected by each democratically elected MP
On the other hand it's also no surprise considering how it evolved: a producer's cartel for the coal and steel, and later agricultural, industries.
It's a miracle it even works so well as it does.
"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."
Quote is from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...
the position it finds itself in is entirely a result of its inability to competently and promptly negotiate contracts with its suppliers
it was entirely focused on price instead of delivery, and it took months more than the suppliers other customers (e.g. the UK) to agree anything
none of this is surprising behavior for an organisation that is primarily a producer's cartel
the mistake was putting such an organisation in charge of the procurement in the first place
the other outrageous fact is that France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands (the "Inclusive Vaccine Alliance") had all but signed a deal back in June, then the EU commission forced itself into the process, spent three months trying to re-negotiate (for a product being produced at cost), then signed the original deal regardless
Like if a few cents or even a few euros per dose would make any difference considering the accruing cost of the pandemic.
You can entice suppliers to serve you first by paying more than others, that's what Israel did.
I don't think that distribution is an issue but that can also be resolved by throwing money directly or through resources at it. Same for production and supply.
It was useless and counter-productive to drag negotiations to lower prices while throwing away 10s of billions a month to prop up locked down economies. It would have been more useful to work with suppliers to go all in on production with unlimited funds and resources so that as many factories as possible could produce (and that would have probably been cheaper overall).
Distributing these vaccines evenly based upon risk factors (age, BMI, ...) is what should have happened. Practical example:
- My double marathon running, under 40 brother in law in Israel is low risk. He should not have received the vaccine yet, even if I like him.
- My heavily overweight 71 years old father is high risk. He should have received the vaccine already.
The EU, the UK, the US, Israel _and_ most of the manufacturers failed abysmally at this.
If countries agreed on things like resource distribution, human rights, economic structure, reward incentives, culture, there would be no need for different nations.
This is purely a negotiation. "Ethics" is a weak appeal stemming from a failure to plan, invest, and execute.
I can perfectly imagine a healthy 40 years old UK constituent supporting the idea that a 80 years old EU constituent should get priority over him. Or the other way round obviously, should that situation ever occur. Governments could take that into account, but we don't even have to go down that contentious rabbit hole to find points of consensus.
I just happen to think that an opportunity to reach a Pareto optimum was missed in negotiations, particularly between the UK and the EU.
Would an agreement on proportionality in vaccine distribution really have been so difficult between the EU and the UK for example? That would have produced real advantages for both sides.
Both governments can harm each other's vaccine supplies, and it's increasingly looking like that could also become reality. That's lose-lose instead of win-win.
This is 100% guaranteed method to get shitty vaccine development and production in the future.
Money is the ultimate incentive - instead of haggling down they should have measured the cost of damages caused by delayed vaccination and tried to outbid.
This idiotic notion that we should prevent pharma companies from profiting on this is exactly why nobody wants to do vaccine development in the first place.
What if your 71 year old father is an agoraphobic hermit and your brother has some wonder job that puts him in a position to literally save the lives of other people as long as he's in close proximity to them.
I understand this is a hard to credit hypothetical but in those circumstances or similar ones we might want your brother at the head of the line. Not because he's more likely to die but because he's more likely to infect me. Or say, any hypothetical fellow citizen.
Frankly I think the most critical thing is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. Any other criteria should come after "as many as quickly." After that sure, have an argument over if more important to get people who might die vaccinated or people who might spread it vaccinated. Knock yourself out - but don't get in the way of the critical thing.
this is exactly what the UK has been doing?
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/17157/production...
Yes and when the EU delays signing contracts, and focuses so much on price, they cause more people to die from covid by slowing the process along.
I agree that the best way forward would have been to minimize deaths of covid, by them not worrying so much about prices and instead supporting development of the vaccine as quickly as possible.
Unless I read this wrong. You are seriously suggesting that we should do global risk-factor prioritization? Meaning that the 50year olds in New York are not allowed to take their doses until 70 year old anti-vaxxerss in the Slovenian alps have had theirs?
This is FUD originating from AZ, which are downright lying.
"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."
This quote is from this article: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...
Here the boss is telling the UK signed in june : https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-inno...
Except it didn't, the UK signed on august 28th, 1 day after the EU (per your link).
In the interview from my link he also says that no vaccines manufactured in the EU leave for countries outside of the EU.
Except he lies about that too: Italy prohibited the export of vaccines to Australia. Last i checked Australia is not a part of the EU.
However the devil as always is in the detail and the two contracts are different and best covered here: https://www.politico.eu/article/the-key-differences-between-...
Crux being the UK contract was a contractual commitment to deliver whilst the EU contract was best effort.
If we instead paid some 10 extra euro per dose, it would have added up to about 1 per cent of the planned recovery fund - and an extra factory or two could have been built during last autumn to start cranking out the vaccines by millions as soon as approved.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-agrees-on-750-billion-euro-recovery...
Nope, it was EU. the EU wanted to wait for final, concrete results before mass adoption.
The EU was very skeptical regarding the vaccines. the EU wanted to perform bulk orders as a union which complicated the ordering process.
The issue is not necessary the number of vaccines but the entire infrastructure to ship, cool and vaccinate people.
Israel had good existing infrastructure, willingness to pay up-front and high demand for the vaccine.
* will note that Israel also agreed to share vaccination data with Pfizer to locate any anomalies\problems
Also if infrastructure whould be a problem, US solved it by just hoarding vaccines: at the end of the year they had 40M Moderna vaccines on stock, they weren't able to use it, but they didn't give it to other countries.
I think now EU is far more active when it comes to the efforts but initially, they were not.
It seems like there is more resistance in the EU to vaccination and data sharing than in Israel.
They are also tiny - a lot smaller than you might think, they are not really hogging all that much supply in terms of absolute numbers.
And finally they agreed to be the research study for the world, so what they are doing does have value, even for your parents in the EU. In particular they will answer the question: If you immunize everyone does COVID stop?
I certainly want this all over ASAP, the vaccination isn’t as fast as I want; my biggest concern right now is the overlap between anti-mask-and-and-lockdown protestors and anti-vaccination protestors.
The AstraZeneca factory in the Netherlands is owned by AstraZeneca, not the EU commission. World War 2 ended a long time ago.
Executive Order 13962—Ensuring Access to United States Government COVID-19 Vaccines December 08, 2020
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/12/11/2020-27...
The problem with this approach is that if this becomes the norm, which so far it seems it will, the next pandemic, the rest of the world will be mega super screwed. Right now, the saving grace of us folks in Canada is that the EU, unlike US and UK, did not prohibit vaccine exports. If they had put the same barriers, we Canadians (as well as most other nations on earth) would have had to wait for the great powers (US/UK/EU) to finish vaccinating their 16-year olds before we could start vaccinating our 90-year olds. So many would have died who would have survived if the vaccines were shared between countries based on population or elderly demographics. It would have been a net gain for US/UK/EU, a net loss for Canada/etc and a net loss for the world as a whole. That's because when you prioritize not-at-risk population from country A over at-risk population from country B, for every A citizen you save, you cause 7900 citizens from country B to die [0].
Also, let's not pretend any country could have signed such a contract with the vaccine manufacturers. If Canada tried to sign a contract with a US manufacturer that said they would give Canada their 96-million-dose contract before selling a single dose to the US, I bet the US government would have ripped the contact to shreds and imposed their own rules on it. Only the countries in which the vaccine producers are located can sign such contracts. So in practice, there is little difference between contract and rule-making in terms of who can do it and what the outcomes are.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
At this point I think it would be the best that they did, pay AZ/pfizer/moderna royalties but just use the military in a WW2 style effort to produce as many dosages possible.
I certainly understand the desire to keep doses within the country. I don't even necessarily blame the administration for doing so. But I do appreciate the EU giving us the opportunity to vaccinate our seniors prior to 18 year olds in the US.
If anything else, we should be focusing it more on single countries impacted the most to get their essential workers and most impacted covered before moving on to a next one.
The US and UK don't fare much worse than the rest of the EU, per capita, do they?
USA+ UK = 34 million cases, EU=24 million cases.
The biggest problem with vaccine mercantilism is if we don't rationally share the vaccine, the vaccine technology and means of production, then the fact we vaccinated 100% of one country will be useless in 2 years with all the variants mutating in less fortunate countries.
By the end of 2021, do you really think that'll still be a problem?
Vaccine shortage is a problem right now. But the end of 2021 we'll have vaccines by the billions.
As for the next mutation, we'll likely have the productions capacity. The question becomes if a vaccine can be developed fast?
https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-us-to-send-first-va...
Also health authorities flip-flopping on the benefits and side effects is disastrous from an adoption point of view. First it is not efficient for people over 65, then it is, then it will only be distributed to people over 50, then it is dangerous, then it is not dangerous anymore. You couldn't manufacture reluctance to getting vaccinated more if you wanted to.
As for the flip-flopping, it’s the usual media game. High public expectations, low delivery.
What is really annoying is that french pharma has not been able to invent a vaccine or at least able to manufacture someone else’s.
The EU could take both the US or the UK route to prevent these exports:
- The EU could rightfully, and has the power to, prevent exports that are essential in a period of crises - which clearly applies to the current situation in Europe. This is the USA route, and it's legitimate.
- The EU can control AZ exports to guarantee they are fulfilling their contractual obligations, which AZ has been literally joking in the face of the EU. This is the UK route, and it's legitimate.
What the media is currently reporting is the second one, the EU is forcing the manufacturer to comply with their contract. If this overlaps with the UK contract, well then that's something I believe the UK must deal with the manufacturer like the EU has been doing for the past 3 months.
I just don't get the double standards, the UK enforcing a contract is good... the EU doing the same is... bad?
If you want to play this game, then companies didn't but EU citizens that work at those factories did create them.
I am not sure why there is even a discussion on these points: the EU was late, and once they were late they did almost everything wrong (unsurprisingly, countries in Europe have a terrible record on vaccines)...that is it.
The APA explicitly states that the EU side waives any claim against AZ arising from delays in delivery of the vaccine. What legal action do you think the EU can or should take, and why?
"Yes, comrade, we have no toilet-paper, but we do not exploit toiler-paper workers!"
It's obvious why this type of casuistry is so appealing to the powerless, but what's scary is when those in leadership become slaves of the same memes - that's when you know that things will only get much, much worse - as owning your failures is a pre-requisite to learning from them, which is a pre-requisite for effective reform. The EU is a system to grow bureaucracy but reform is effectively blocked by the moralizers. Thus, things will continue to get worse until the all the sanctimonious people are kicked out of office or until the society itself collapses under the massive weight of moralistic bureaucrats.
Moderna is made in Switzerland and then goes to Spain for finishing does that make it an EU or Swiss export?
We all need to cooperate to succeed.
Given the relative country sizes it's weird that the EU seems to have comparatively less vaccine production
And if the EU really wants to 'put the issue to bed' why don't they just publish the export numbers but vaccine type and country?
This is untrue. The US in the process of exporting 4 million doses of vaccine between Mexico and Canada[1].
The US has also said that once they have ensured that there is enough vaccine supply for all Americans(likely around May 1st)it will begin exporting any surplus in the summer.[2] The US has not met that target of enough vaccines for its population.
The reality is that US and EU took very different approaches towards vaccine procurement. The US government acted more like an investor and threw insane sums of cash at the drugmakers with very few strings attached and the EU sought lower prices and higher accountability for drug makers. There were very different risk profiles between the two. In the end the EU placed their orders months after the US, the UK and Israel. Ursula von der Leyen seems quite content to shift the blame everywhere else and propagate the view that the EU is being taken advantage of.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-us-to-send-first-va...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/biden-moves-up-vaccine-tim...
The EU bureaucrats were simply worse at negotiating contracts and doing their job.
(I believe that some UK companies supply the lipids)
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/773245da-900a-468e-aaf3-96ec8c433...
Block AZ in the EU, you'll force the populist Johnson into tit-for-tat retaliation - and we'll all go to hell in a hand-cart.
Not “the EU”. Private companies with factories in European countries fulfilled pre-orders placed and paid for months ago. “The EU” owns no factories and produces no vaccines itself.
What's fair about it? The number of exported vaccines would account for only 10% of EU population, by your own admission. Since the poor countries in need of vaccine are from Africa and Asia (mostly), they most definitely have much greater populations. What's fair about exporting just 10% of vaccines?
They are contracts and dates on which x million doses are to be delivered by. Why didn't EU do the same? Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways. Say, no vaccine would be produced unless a certain item that is produced in USA goes to a Belgium factory.
The only difference is that the EU remained truthful to the free market while both the USA and the UK put country first closes.
> Crying now it's too late and a trade war can go both ways.
There are no trade wars. Both the USA and the UK have shown themselves to be extremely unreliable partners which will not respect the rules they profess to believe in as soon as it doesn't favor them. That was already obvious with Trump and is only more obvious now.
I fully expect the USA to lose its place as the main global power in the next decade if not sooner. The UK will probably pay the price a lot sooner as the EU is not going to forget and they have no other reliable ally.
The US signed their AZ deal months before the EU and UK. They threw billions of dollars at every company they could find, readily paying high rates while other countries tried to negotiate lower ones. So I'm really not sure where this idea of yours comes from.
$1.2 Billion to AZ in May: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/05/21/trump-administrati...
EU's deal was signed in August: https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/az-nets-396m-down...
$1.95 Billion to Pfizer in July: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/health/was-the-pfizer-vac...
EU's deal with Pfizer was in November: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
"The EU reached a deal with Pfizer in November for 300 million doses and in January negotiated a preliminary deal for another 300 million." https://www.dw.com/en/eu-orders-300-million-more-biontech-pf...
USA agreed to buy 100-500 Million in JULY 2020 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/22/health/pfizer-covid-19-va...
The fact is that EU is too slow, too risk adverse and 28 countries must agree. In USA the President winks, and it's done. (In this case it was beneficial.)
I want to get your view and if I think it’s valid, I want to pass it onto my MP, to put democratic pressure for the UK to maintain its status of a rules-based society.
There are trade wars, and there will continue to be.
> Both the USA and the UK have shown themselves to be extremely unreliable partners which will not respect the rules they profess to believe in as soon as it doesn't favor them.
That's rich coming from the folks responsible for GDPR. You pollute our web, and then cry about things that don't favor you? Boo-hoo.
Germany gave BioNTech 445M. The US didn't give Pfizer/BioNTech anything.
They've also created problems to the AZ vaccine at every turn. So much so that now some people simply refuse it.
So if they hadn't shipped 8 million doses to the UK (where that vaccine was developed with public funds) there is no guarantee at all that they would have vaccinated 8 million more people.
Edit with non-UK source (as of 2 weeks ago):
"Millions of Vaccines in EU Unused (March 11, 10:00 a.m. ET) More than 11.5 million Covid vaccine doses that have been delivered to European Union countries have not yet been used, according to Bloomberg. The number of shots sent by manufacturers now totals 54.2 million, compared to 46 million a week previously. The data covers the week to March 7. [1]
[1] https://www.supplychainbrain.com/articles/31024-coronavirus-...
Distribution is no more a problem than in the UK. The EU has probably the best infrastructure in the world and vast resources, while being smaller than the US.
This thing isn't over before vaccine availability isn't production-limited anymore.
The real mistake that the EU made was to not realize early on that vaccine production was going to be a huge issue in 2021, and make fixing that a priority.
And the first 15-20% or so of vaccines administered are CRITICAL. In true pareto principle, 80% of hospitalizations come from 20% of the population.
I'm in Belgium. We are facing a third wave. We're going back into lockdown pretty soon (it's almost certain). With just 400k more vaccines administered, we would not be in this mess.
400k. The US vaccinates 3 million every day.
Besides 20-40 range, also people that work at grocery stores, which are always open and can spread COVID. Elderly stay at homes have less contacts with other etc.
There was a preprint regarding that in the US, but everyone focuses on deaths and doesn't think of causes.
The US has like 30x as many people as Belgium. A better comparison would be Ohio, which has about the population of Belgium and is administering ~90k doses per day, which is sorta like vaccinating ~60k people a day (based off a guess that ~15k doses are the one dose J&J vaccine).
I agree that prioritizing the most vulnerable, regardless of nationality is the morally better choice.
Zero sum, it is not.
At 10%, there's still an endless number of old people left unvaccinated, and if you infect a large percentage of mid aged people, that alone is easily enough to wreck your health system.
If you chose not to do a lockdown in the third wave because "older people are already vaccinated" that would just mean that your hospitals would fill up with younger people instead, since total number infected would be much higher than ever before.
If you vaccinate the old, hospitals don't just "fill up" with the young. There are just straight up less hospitalizations. The virus still spreads but the percentage of severe cases go way down. Which need i remind you is the reason why we do lockdowns at all: because without them, hospitals are overrun and there is a risk of a healthcare system collapse.
The aim of the lockdown was never to eradicate the virus. It was to keep the healthcare system working.
That is exactly what would happen if you let the pandemic roll at R > 1. People aged 40-60 are about a third as likely to get hospitalised as people 60-80. So if you triple the amount of cases in a population while having zero cases in the old age bracket, your hospitals will be just as full.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
Virus mutates and if it can't infect elderly it will infect younger and does.
Median age of hospitalized people is getting lower and we will soon see that vaccinating elderly wasn't the best choice (they don't spread COVID that much - don't take part in waves, are just victims to those).
As I understand it, because they were ready to pay whatever it costs. Which, if you look at the numbers, is not much at all.
That particular cost wasn't financial though. It was a promise to fast track rollout where other countries wanted to go through lengthy approval and review processes (I am not saying lengthy == bad in that case), vaccinate their population as fast as possible and share data about efficacy with the manufacturers. The Israeali government was ready to take risks that many other countries weren't.
I found an article confirming this. Though it also says
> "Israel paid about $30 per dose, almost double what other nations did"
I'm always shocked by how little money that is. $3000 per dose would be cheap!!!
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/01/05/the-secre...
Having a population of 8M helps a lot.
If Israel (or the UAE) had a population of 350M - they would not be even close to 100% vaccinated.
The problem there has been getting enough doses delivered.
I think it is silly that EU citizens are dying and/or locked down because of money and/or contracts.
The UK is doing better with vaccines, but yeah, it didn't do any better during the pandemic.
Sweden has a lower per-capita COVID deathtoll than Czechia, Belgium, Slovenia, UK, Hungary, Bosnia, Italy, Bulgaria, Moldova, Macedonia, Slovakia, USA, Portgual, Spain, Croatia, France, Poland.
Its 2020 deaths were only 5.75% higher than its 2018 deaths:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
And even then can mainly be explained by a weak 2019 flu season (with deaths in 2019 3.6% below 2018) and potentially lower deaths in 2021 due to mortality displacement.
By contrast, Germany, with extensive and rolling lockdowns, had deaths 3.2% higher than 2018:
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...
So a superficial analysis would suggest that society-wide lockdowns could have saved a country like Sweden 2.55% of deaths, or 2,486 people. So you would be locking down 4,115 people in order to save one of them from dying of COVID, beyond what could be achieved from softer or voluntary measures.
And although Sweden didn't do lockdowns, almost every corp sent their workers to WFH, and other people reduced their outgoings.
I have a friend in Sweden who has a shop and he complained that he has never seen so few people on streets and in his shop.
So Sweden had unofficial lockdowns.
Approval speed has nothing to do with it.
That explanation doesn't make a whole lot of sense since the delay was only a few weeks for Biontech/Pfizer or Moderna. As you mentioned, AZ is not even approved in the US. Europe would need to vaccinate around 50M people in a few weeks.
EU politicans know that the EU has failed at procurement. They now try to cover that up by blaming AZ and explaining delays with additional safety measures.
The EU branded the UK's emergency approval "reckless".
Contrast this with the UK which has a very centralised governance model and a centralised single payer health system.
Not being critical of or praising either model or behaviour in either case. Just not surprising that this happens when the challenge is to deliver on a clear objective as rapidly as possible.
(And still disappointing that EU citizens have to deal with the results of this).
Europe's Vaccine Disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964197 - Jan 2021 (418 comments)
I think there have been other threads as well?
So far the EU has exported 41.6 million doses of the vaccine (the largest importer being the UK)[2]. Both the US and the UK have exported 0 vaccines.
[1] https://twitter.com/davekeating/status/1372897635577761803
[2] https://twitter.com/AlexTaylorNews/status/137362147260701081...
The UK (companies) on the other hand are exporting vaccine components (fatty lipids) that enable those factories to produce vaccines for not only the UK, but the EU, and Australia, if it ever receives its doses.
Whereas a similar contract between Germany and Biontech (Germany paid biontech $445 million to help develop the vaccine) didn't include a clause defining export priorities. Pfizer-Biontech is exported all over the world.
Canada, for example, gets their Pfizer-Biontech from the EU, instead of Michigan where they're also produced.
The social media is full to the brim with "EU exported because they're nice guys" including the top comment on HN.
Or any opinion these days? Social media. The mute button, echo chambers, confirmation bias, lack of critical thought, and so on?
I think the events of the last few years will keep psychologists in business for decades.
A Douglas Adams quote feels apt:
"So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. "
Fyi this is completely untrue. The EU can (and has, now) block export of any product it wants. The US forced all domestic vaccine production sites to work for the US, while the EU failed to do so.
The US also didnt secure such contracts, they simply forbid any export. The UK is helped by AZ not sending anything produced in the UK to the EU, despite the EU contract stipulating that doses would also come from the UK.
USA bought vaccines from everyone a year ago and opened the check book, giving them billions without knowing if the vaccine will work. And then put all their weight to help them find factories and stuff. So USA gambled relatively nothing (Covid has cost many trillions) and gained a lot.
EU doing what they do best...meetings. USA bans exports in this sense: if Pfizer agreed to give USA 50 million shots in March, no exports until that number is delivered. Seems fair.
They did take some money from Germany though, because it came without strings.
Is it a coincidence that they were the first vaccine approved?
So to be fair it should be Germany getting all those Pfizer shots rather than the US.
The EU should start to invoke the Doha Declaration[1] (patent release), and use it in full, if necessary. This would pressure AstraZeneca to fulfill the contracts they signed and already got payed for.
It is irrelevant that other customers signed first / paid more / whatever. They signed a contract, and they did not deliver - there must be consequences. (not childish, passive-aggressive, vaccine clot-danger rumors/whining)
If they cannot deliver their production commitments, then the EU should open the patents and procure the production elsewhere, in AZ's place. (for example, Bayer's vaccine production capacity is unused)
The US did it - the nice way - with J&J and Merck.
EU bureaucrats need to adult-up, (and put aside neoliberal dogma / possible private sector careers) and act proactively for Citizen's (health and economic) needs. The more days people are without vaccination, the more will needlessly die. And further will the economy / livelihoods plummet.
I also see no problem that the EU continues production beyond its own direct requirements, and supplies those in the World that need vaccines and cannot afford them.
It seems clear to me that a company would move out if they spent millions+ researching a vaccine only to have the government nationalize (i.e. steal) the patent. Good for regular citizens in the short term, but seriously damaging in the long term.
This type of operations aren't simple assembly lines that can be moved around, there's a lot of incentives to be in Europe, and this has been built up in decades.
No company would move out, they like Europe, a lot. There's a lot of qualified professionals, good infrastructure, and most likely good incentives to be there.
What you're seeing is the reaction to a company borderline criminal actions. They overlapped contracts, they are choosing what contracts to break and which ones to not break, they are delaying processes that are compromising deliveries, and they keep trying to move products while failing to deliver their contractual obligations.
It's like they are stretching the "best reasonable efforts" to the maximum.
Who's "stealing" who?
Hasn't a contract been signed, and haven't the vaccines been actually paid for? Furthermore, who banked the cost (and risk) of the Fundamental Research that led to viable vaccines in record time - months, instead of years? (free hint: it was mostly European taxpayers money)
By lifting the patents, the EU would only be helping pharma fulfill their own contractual obligations and restore legality. Obviously, it should still pay the agreed price per dose.
Or are you suggesting that, sometimes, the Law is not supposed to be followed? ...specially if we are afraid to upset important people? Doesn't this, instead, create the moral hazard that the Law, in fact, is actually optional?
I'm genuinely curious to hear your (and other's) thoughts on this.
There always will be companies willing to serve the commercial opportunities in a space as massive as a continent. EU bureaucrats just need to start to behave like adults. (or the Adults in the Room need to assert themselves).
You don’t know how good you have it.
Needless to say that the EU – the hotbed of excess politicians who've been "early reitred" by their domestic parties into Brussles/Strasbourg – isn't surprising anyone with failing so hard on the vaccine issue.
Failing on so many levels: From the fine-print of contracts (e.g. with AZ) to the big scale disinformation campaigns (by Euractiv and domestic media outlets) spurring Anti-British sentiments (e.g. good old nationalistic hate, up-cycled for the upper-class).
What we are witnessing is compound incompetence, which upon fear being detected hastingly looks for an escape goat.
The EMA did not get any additional power delegated to it by Merkel or anybody else. Maybe you are talking about the joint vaccine procurement by the European Commission? An instrument that does actually allow EU member states to purchase additional vaccines.
If you are talking about EMA: the EMA does not even disallow countries from using other vaccines not approved by the EMA (Hungary is using Sputnik V for example).
The EU is not a "hotbed of excess politicians who've been "early retired"". That might have been true on some level in the past but everybody has realized for quite some time that the EU has real powers and people want those jobs. There are many young MEPs and very competent members of the European Commission.
We are not witnessing incompetence: Vaccine production is very difficult and the EU is not running a nationalistic scheme like the US or the UK who are not exporting any vaccines whatsoever. In four-five months most adult people in the EU will have the chance to be vaccinated. That's an enormous success story. Other developed countries don't have any significant amount of vaccines at all. All western countries with vaccines (except for US and UK) only have them because of the EU.
The EU as a body didn't set any of that up.
Yet from what i see the public discourse is most concerned about opening up restaurant terraces, etc. and not the immense economical damage that having late vaccination campaign will inflict.
3.4% World
1.5% Asia
0.42% Africa
15% N. America
10% Europe
4.8% S. America
0.44% Oceania
The EU is a trade-bloc, full stop. The EMA is there to make it easier for pharma.
Not a bad strategy but it doesn't scale (especially for the Sputnik V current production capability)
https://telex.hu/koronavirus/2021/03/08/koronavirus-melyik-v...
Example:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
I mean, I get it, my own country is doing badly even compared to other EU countries but we need to keep in mind that the EU is at 10% or so vaccinated which is a lot more than almost any other major country or political bloc.
If you show only the UK and US as comparators, it looks really bad but that's a hard comparison set to go up against.
It's actually really ironic that the the UK and US took an approach that most people would consider a very European one by directly involving themselves and investing up-front in vaccine production while the European Commission took the neoliberal route of placing commercial orders in most cases and doing some but much less direct investment.
What has ended up happening is basically the confluence of suboptimal but not necessarily bad decision making and some really bad luck.
The EU, UK, and US all bought large portfolios of vaccines, enough a few times over if they all worked. They also all invested up-front in R&D, the EU proportionally less per head of population but of course many EU countries are not so rich and do not have so much domestic biotech/pharma so this has to be seen in that context as well. The EU is not all France/Benelux/Germany which do have such industries.
All three gambled that their portfolios would pay off.
US went heavy on J&J, Pfizer/Biontech, Moderna (not as sure about the US portfolio but loads of others) UK went for AZ, Valneva, GSK/Sanofi, Novavax, Pfizer/Biontech, (and later bought some Moderna but not much and only after it was approved). There is some kind of future agreement with CureVac which was only recently concluded. EU went for Pfizer-Biontech, AZ, J&J GSK/Sanofi, CureVac, Moderna. I think there have been discussions with Novavax and Valneva but no concrete orders.
(UK and EU have the vaccines roughly in order of order size)
So what happened?
Essentially the Pfizer vaccine worked brilliantly and they seem to have gotten their scale-up working quite well. Good for EU and UK both.
AZ works well (probably slightly less well, and with quite a lot of evidence that the decision not to use the stabilised fusion protein is what is making a difference to performance against certain variants) but AZ is having an absolute nightmare getting their yields up. This has affected all their global production - they had intended to delivery 30m doses to the UK by September... 2020 and 100m by the end of the year and clearly have not been able to. Making biological products is really hard, clearly. This has slowed down both the UK and EU roll-outs but because the UK scale-up started earlier (note my comments above about investment agreements, they started production scaling at their Oxford site as early as April 2020) they are further in the production ramp and of course most of the UK delay was before the vaccine was approved. So despite their UK order technically being later than their EU order, it has been felt much harder in the EU because the "lateness" of the UK order mostly happened before the vaccine (or any other vaccine) was approved.
The GSK/Sanofi vaccine has been postponed and may never see the light of day.
Novavax has had good results and is currently preparing for the approval process.
Both the UK and EU had hoped to use either AZ or GSK/Sanofi as their "workhorse" vaccine but the UK had slightly less emphasis on it and bought / invested in more doses of vaccine per head. The EU has not done a great job here but it's also not abject failure, they've just had some bad luck in that simultaneously their two biggest orders were cancelled and slowed down.
It could easily have been the case that a different set of vaccines didn't work and/or were hard to make and then it might be the US or the UK with the problem.
I think before we draw big picture conclusions (apart from Ursula vdL being useless, but I think any German who remembered how good she was at defence procurement could have told you that) we need to remember that to some extent there are historical contingencies at play here and we can end up over-fitting by assuming that literally every difference we see is due to structural problems/advantages faced by one side or another.
Once any vaccine hits adjust orders up as required. If any vaccine makes it late enough that you don't need it, donate to a poor country or just pay and ask your doses be destroyed, thanks for trying.
In a year will we still be talking about the vaccine shortness? I'm thinking no.
So yeah, the EU could use dirty tricks like export bans. But do we really need to?
At the end of the day, it matters if vaccination picks up before the next flue season. For the reminder of this one, we all have to rely on social distancing.
I think talking about winning or failed vaccination campaigns might be a bit early.
Vykázaná očkování celkem = Administered total
Vykázaná očkování za včera = Administered in the previous day
Osoby s ukončeným očkováním (dvě dávky) celkem = People with complete vaccination (two shots) total
Osoby s ukončeným očkováním celkem za včera = People with complete vaccination in the previous day
premières doses = first doses (6.1M)
rendez-vous prévus cette semaine = appointments this week (0.5M)
There is a second tab dedicated to logistics: https://dashboard.covid19.data.gouv.fr/logistique-vaccins?lo...
That makes it about 10M delivered to date. Vaccination is primarily supply-restricted, only the elderly (75+, or 50+ with preconditions), and medical/strategic personnel (inc firefighters) can get vaccinated for now.
At current pace (last two weeks), it would take ~10 months to get 80% vaccinated with one dose... :/
https://www.gov.pl/web/szczepimysie/raport-szczepien-przeciw...
Liczba szczepień 1 dawką = first doses administered
Liczba szczepień 2 dawką = second doses administered
Liczba dawek dostarczonych do Polski = doses delivered from suppliers
Liczba dawek dostarczonych do punktów = doses delivered to vaccination points
Zamówienia w trakcie realizacji = doses assigned to a vaccination point, but not yet administered
Stan magazynu = warehouse stock, unclear if this is for second doses (methodology changed last week)
Keep in mind that we typically get vaccines on Monday and vaccinate throughout the week - yesterday there were ~5k available doses in the whole of Poland
Hungary is a little ahead, as they are also using the Russian vaccine. But still behind the US.
A terrible twitter threat summarized this as "UE played expecting fair play. This now looks naive."
https://mobile.twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/13728976355777...
I love bitching at my government like every one else, but it can't see what logistics you can improve to vaccinate more people when you don't exactly have vaccines.
Oh, and great play by FB to make sure no one below 30 in europe wants a vaccine, you played well for team USA on this one !
I suppose this will serve as a "never again" shock for bringing back some factories in the EU. Or it will simply serve as a stepping stone for nationalist who will just make things a tad worse, before it (maybe) (one hopes) (who knows ?) gets better.
> "Meanwhile in March 2020, President Trump tried unsuccessfully to steal BioNTech from Germany"
They tried to buy the company. Not sure when "Buy" became "Steal"
> "Trump seemed to be in no hurry to sign Pfizer purchase contracts. "
He then links to an article about how they weren't rushing to buy additional vaccines on top of the 100 million already purchased. So, again, highly misleading. Not buying additional vaccines just became "in no hurry to sign Pfizer purchase contracts"
However, at the same time, I can't help feel that we've jumped the queue slightly. The EU is experiencing another wave which will doubtlessly culminate in thousands of deaths, the majority will be from people older or with much more serious health complications than my partner.
I'm kinda sick of reading these debates about who ordered what and when under what conditions. There is a complete lack of compassion, we should be doing what we can to help those countries who still have older people unvaccinated. We can wait another couple of months before our holidays to Blackpool and Stalyvegas.
The US, despite actually doing very well at vaccine distribution, should probably have switched to the one shot for everyone model.
Speak for yourself. I'm not being glib. Compassion is wearing thin. There are anti-lockdown protests all over the UK and EU. There is a limit to how much more the ordinary citizen can endure. If that means that some people have to risk death then perhaps, as awful as it sounds, that may be for the best. They're the ones who should stay at home.
And yes, I do have elderly relatives who are at risk.
Britain erred on the side of faster rollout: many countries criticize them for rushing AZ's vaccine approval process actually.
Because Britain somewhat rushed the vaccine rollout, its probably not a fair comparison to other countries. USA vs EU is probably a better comparison (but maybe not, because USA has a *dominating* industrial base and can physically make more things than most other countries)
The difference was that Britain invested early on in multiple vaccines, created a whole new government task force with the only job to get the country vaccinated, they collaborated between AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford in trials and the MHRA (which itself is one of the best if not the best medical regulator in the world) was running a lot of the approval checks in parallel which the EU and other regulators didn't do. Additionally the UK evaluated all data regarding the new COVID-19 vaccines and what we historically know from other vaccines that the chances of an initial one-jab strategy were extremely high almost to a point where it would be irresponsible to not first vaccinate as many people with one jab as possible. For once the UK put science and common sense above red tape and nationalistic rhetoric unlike many leaders in the EU like Macron or Ursula Von Der Lying.
All of the vaccines passed through the standard clinical trials and phases and were approved by the MHRA using the same process that would be applied to any other vaccine.
The vaccine testing and approval was fast because layers of bureaucracy were removed (e.g. writing proposals, securing funding, finding volunteers).
It's not fair to say that the UK rushed either the approval or the rollout. It's a bit like saying Usain Bolt rushed to win the 100m. Someone has to do it first. The UK approval process is one of the most stringent in the world.
Almost, but not quiet. As of 3/21 Britain has done 44 doses per 100 people.
Israel is leading with 112, followed by United Arab Emirates with 74 and Chile with 44.31. These countries are all smaller than Britain though, as you point out. No country as big or bigger than Britain is doing it faster.
For comparison, the US has done 37 per 100, while most of the EU countries are between 12-13. Hungary is at 21, because they have not only used the EU provided vaccines, but also using the Russian vaccine.
There are other factors than dose availability though. Putting vaccines into people isn't easy to do on a large scale in a short time window. Vaccine programmes are usually running with a much larger window, with vaccines that doesn't require extreme cold temperatures.
UK seems better prepared for this than many of the EU-bloc's countries.
The other part of the question however is: "Severely lags behind what?". Even with a "slow" rollout, EU countries in general are better off than many other countries in the world. It isn't the case they are trying to keep up with the pack in general, as they are well positioned. It's more that there are a few countries who are doing extremely well on a quick rollout.
One of the many spats about this between the EU and the UK was when an EU functionary incorrectly claimed the UK had export controls and they had to back track[1].
As far as I know, the EU gambled on a French vaccine that unfortunately failed, then ordered other vaccines much later than everyone else.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6d28903d-3723-45cc-878a-21e1f2d39...
Jury is still somewhat out about which method is better, and who will finish first. I'd put money on both reaching 70% of eligible people vaccinated with both doses around the same time.
This is one of those situations where "EU" as a concept is a bit of an overgeneralization for 27 loosely-coordinating countries.
The volume of jabs will dictate the outcome more than the 1-now-1-much-later or 1-now-1-soon strategies.
So yes, the UK is far ahead of most other countries in first doses administered, but they're also going off-book for their vaccination protocol in a lot of ways that make it a bad point of comparison for other countries which are following clinical recommendations more closely.
[0] There's some clinical evidence in support of the 12-week gap for the AstraZeneca vaccine, though the UK made this decision before that study had been released, and there is not yet analogous data to support the efficacy of a 12-week period for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which the UK is also administering on a 12-week gap.
Currently my parents are in Canada, both in their 70s and still have no idea when the vaccine will be available to them whereas I am in Israel in my late 30s and I had my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine over a month ago.
The difference between the countries is startling. Yes Israel paid more money for the vaccine and agreed to share anonymized information with Pfizer. The math checked out (cost of closure vs vaccine) so it made sense. The fact that some countries focused on price negotiation vs mass vaccinations astounds me as each day a country is in lockdown costs billions of dollars. But I am not going to focus on that aspect.
What I am going to talk about is how Canada and Israel managed the crisis.
In Israel the general trend is to not really overthink things. This is perfect when there is a crisis and decisions need to be made fast. For instance when the virus started Israel was one of the first countries, outside of Italy and China, to implement a strict closure. Another habit Israelis have is to bend or flat out break the rules as they are in general very skeptical of anything the government does. This can also be important during the handling of a crisis, as some rules can get in the way of finding a solution faster. But this also has a downside. For instance after a few weeks of closure in which very few people died, a large chunk of Israelis started to ignore the closure rules.
Canada on the other hand was very slow to implement a closure but when they did the population was quick to listen and from my understanding continue to follow the rules the government set a year later.
Now to the vaccine program, when it became clear that Israel bet on the wrong vaccine, the PM called the CEO of Pfizer 30 times and agreed to pay way more just to get the vaccine faster. Our government, which is normally very slow to move, was able to arrange the funding for this within a few days. When the vaccine arrived in Israel - the government with the healthcare companies (Israel has public healthcare, but it is managed by 4 private companies) implemented a plan within days to distribute the vaccine to the entire population. The plan was intentionally simple with a very simple criteria of who is eligible and who is not (over this age - yes, under this age - no, healthcare worker - yes, at risk - yes). There was also some innovation in that they were the first country to repackage the vaccines so they could be distributed in smaller amounts to places like nursing homes or small communities (this entire process had to be done in a freezer).
Remember when I said Israelis break the rules? Well an interesting thing started to happen. At the end day, if there were vaccines that would need to be thrown out, nurses took it upon themself to give leftover vaccines to whoever would take it. They didn’t wait or ask for permission they just did what needed to be done. There were even reports of nurses walking out and pulling people off of sidewalks to come and get vaccinated. This of course didn’t last very long. Within days there were Facebook groups, not managed by any official organization, but by individual Israelis, that were publishing the location of clinics with leftover doses that need to be used by days end. Now the entire country was mobilized as part of the vaccine effort and this meant that very few doses were wasted. You see in Israel, they treated the vaccine effort like a war and that meant mobilizing the population, a clear goal, fast decision making and accepting that the one in the field (the doctors and nurses) have some freedom to make decisions that will lead to the goals being achieved. I don’t think this was a conscious choice, it’s just part of the countries DNA.
Contrast to Canada - when they got the vaccine, it sat in freezers while they discussed who would get it first. They didn’t focus on mass distribution and instead focused on making the most correct decision (which of course leads to no decision). It was compounded by the fact that each province created their own distribution plan, often based on a long complex set of criteria. Now maybe it did happen, but I don’t see it being nearly as likely that a nurse in Canada would take it upon him or herself to distribute the vaccine to those that don’t fit the official criteria, even if it meant throwing out vaccines at the end of the day. Canada didn’t take a war footing when it came to the vaccine distribution program.
Now let me make something clear - a lot of the things that made the vaccine program a success here, are also the things that cause the biggest headaches during normal times and a lot of the things that made it a relative failure in Canada are what make Canada great (over planning vs under planning for instance). Had the vaccine taken another year, I think Canada would have ended up in a much better position than Israel did.
I suspect the EU is much more like Canada and possibly even worse. My impression of the EU these days is that they do not take problems seriously until it’s too late. The writing is always on the wall, but they are very slow to move.
There are a lot of good things about the EU too. But in a real crisis I want to be somewhere that knows how to make quick decisions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/world/europe/europe-vacci...
> While Washington went into business with the drug companies, Europe was more fiscally conservative and trusted the free market.
Countries that are ahead of the EU (on avg.) per person doses are mostly small (Israel, UAE, Chile). Comparable are the UK, US and China
In terms of actual doses the EU is behind the US and maybe China (debatable numbers).
The rest are behind
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
I completely agree the EU could be doing a better job, but in terms of general comparison, it's not doing bad
(It's doing better than Canada/Australia/Japan) for example.
Cue HN complaining how much "bureaucracy" and how much "red tape" the EU has, and smth smth socialism.
Edit: I'm not sure I buy the proposed argument that in a way, "the EU believed in the free market and fair play too much, and the US and UK betrayed those noble ideals", but I do believe the EU failed to recognize and/or counter the state of play, that the US and UK had legislated production partners and output to stay within national borders.
The second problem is largely national: some countries have been slow to use the severely reduced deliveries they have gotten (possibly because their schedules were screwed up by the shortfall). The national governments have been really happy to pretend the national programs are perfect and there aren't large stockpiles of unused vaccines in their countries, and to blame all the tardiness on the shortfall "from the EU".
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/eu-exported-mor...