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Comment by onetimemanytime | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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> 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.

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