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Comment by brmgb | Hacker News Reader

The USA negociated more slowly than the EU. The UK signed a research deal before the EU but didn't order until a week later.

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.

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> The USA negociated more slowly than the EU.

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...

Didn't Italy just recently tried to block exports to Australia?

Minor nitpick but the UK signed a deal with AZ a couple of days before the US, it was the EU that was 3 months late to the party.

Clicking through your second link you get to the article about the US deal on the 21st of May: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/astrazeneca-scores-1b-fr...

and again for the UK deal on the 17th of May: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/after-signing-up-to-deli...

OK, show me a press release mentioning orders, contracts.

"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.)

> The fact is that EU is too slow, too risk adverse and 28 countries must agree.

Not strictly true, as for these purposes the UK was still bound by EU rules until Jan 1st this year and did its own thing for the vaccinations without breaking those rules.

The EU nations generally like to work together and negotiate as one, as doing so saves money; money was the wrong thing to optimise for in this case.

> The EU nations generally like to work together and negotiate as one, as doing so saves money; money was the wrong thing to optimise for in this case.

Right. Probably should have optimized for human life. Hindsight is 20/20.

Optimizing for human life would have meant spending a potentially unlimited amount of money. Maybe a few EU countries would be happy with that trade off, but the poorer countries wouldn't have been able to afford it.

The EU was in the difficult position, as either the eurosceptics in the poor countries would complain that the EU was throwing them to the wolves, or the eurosceptics in the rich countries would complain that they were having to subsidise the poor countries who refused to pay the full amount.

When faced with a global pandemic, vaccinating just your own country while your neighbours become a breeding ground for new variants isn't really solving the problem, especially if your neighbours are closely integrated with you and citizens have freedom of movement across borders. This is why we can't have nice things.

Nah, I think this is a case of hindsight 20/20 — If they’d optimised for reaching a decision quickly rather than cost, that would’ve been better. Not the only mistake by the EU nations despite the lower average death count/capita than the UK, but certainly an embarrassing one.

I'm not sure that optimising for "reaching a decision quickly" is really a valid strategy here. To do that, you'd basically turn the first rule of improv into a constitutional principle and always say "Yes" to any binary decision.

If what you mean is "reaching the correct decision quickly" then that sounds like it's begging the question, because correctness is subjective and it has to be optimised relative to certain other criteria than just speed.

I agree with you, though, that it is definitely worth looking at death count per capita (of different jurisdictions) and compare that with the costs of vaccination programs and lockdowns. Those won't be easy calculations to make, but after keeping epidemiologists and economists busy for the rest of the decade we may eventually learn some fascinating lessons from all this.

Au contraire.

This way of looking at things ignores the astonishing cost of maintaining emergency support payments to people and businesses, which are significantly more expensive than the price differential on vaccines. Ireland's spending over a million euro per hour on that and will now be forced to do so for thousands of additional hours.

I’m not claiming they were successful in lowering costs, just that their approach fits the hypothesis that that was their intent. “Penny wise, pound foolish” as the saying in my home country goes.

How did the UK govt (not the private Swedish-British company AstraZeneca) show itself to be an unreliable partner? Be as specific as possible.

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 no trade wars.

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.

The web was already polluted. GDPR only removed the facade and now you see the ugliness that was behind it.

GDPR has added unsightly boilerplate to our shared web experience. You've only succeeded in expanding our attack surface.

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