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.
Now, as I've said, there's demand\need since the EU scaled up the vaccination efforts however, look back 3-5 months.
EU was discussing just how to split\manage the vaccines among the union members, while Israel was vaccinating at a neck-breaking pace.
While my family in EU were not sure if they want to be vaccinated, people in Israel were waiting hours in line to even get a chance to get vaccinated.
Israel currently has over 80% of the population vaccinated, I'm willing to bet that even if you provide that number of vaccines to any European country, the numbers will be far lower.
If you look here https://covidtracker.fr/vaccintracker/ you'll see that on the second graph, the blue curves (vaccination) closely follow the gray curve (deliveries).
And while France is one of the most anti-vaccine countries in the world, there is still no shortage of people wanting to be vaccinated.
In the end, I just think it is just the result of negotiations. Now, it is essentially a zero-sum game, the only way to get more doses is to take it from others, and the EU wasn't as aggressive. We will all get vaccines in the end, it is just about how much you value your head start.
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.