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Comment by CyberRage | Hacker News Reader

Wow, you almost make it seem like Israel has done something wrong.

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

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There's no issue with the infrastructure, the Pfizer vaccines are not coming, because Israel has priority. I'm not saying Israel did anything wrong, they are protecting their population and payed the price for it, while EU was trying to get the price of the vaccine down instead of thinking about the consequences of every lost day.

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.

France, a while back, was receiving good numbers but were failing to keep up in terms of demand\infrastructure.

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.

France has no problem vaccinating people, they just adjust their strategy based on deliveries.

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.

There's resistance to AstraZeneca vaccine, and in my country (Hungary) to Sinopharm and SPUTNIK-V. Russian troops invaded Hungary in the past, so there's not much trust in a Russian vaccine, we trust the EU and US more, but the government is laundering lots of money by getting vaccines from the east (they payed $31 per dose for Sinopharm vaccine)

You're looking at thing as they are now.

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.

The United States was the first country to approve the Moderna vaccine. If the US "wasn't able to use it" then neither was any other country.

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