Hacker News Reader

Comment by _benedict | Hacker News Reader

It's worth remembering the UK bought 3x as many doses per capita than the EU (of AZ), and its domestic manufacturing capacity anyway has to serve a much smaller population. The luck in large part is the Ox/AZ was successful and fast, and the UK had placed a very large order for it.

View on HN

Yep. The EU on the other hand spread the risk across multiple suppliers. One of which fell through so far, Sanofi if memory serves well. I for my part have no issue with the procurement strategy. The contracts, assuming they are all similar to the AZ one, are crap so.

And after contract signature, the EU basically took a step back. The EU did tell member states that logistics will be critical, and that logistics will be up to member states to sort out. Kind of right, but also kind of lazy. Even lazier are member states that failed to sort logistics out. Especially those that were fast to blame the EU for that.

This whole thing is not EU business, member states are responsible for medical issues.

The procurement, and the procurement alone, was something the member states decided ad-hoc to pool in this particular instance, in order to avoid exactly the kind of situation between member states that we currently have with the UK.

And that has actually worked remarkably well: all the EU member states have essentially the same percent of their population vaccinated. Solidarność! They are also actually doing quite well internationally, with only the US/UK and Israel significantly better (and some Gulf states).

And of course the US/UK achieved this by not playing fair. Trump tried to buy Biontech outright, and you can bet he would have denied Germany access to the vaccine developed in Germany had he succeeded. Oxford wanted to partner with Merck, but the UK government forbade this and forced them to go with Astrazeneca instead, exactly because they could then foist UK-first contracts on them.

Coming back to the EU procurement process: there simply was no precedent for this, no EU jurisdiction, no EU body that regularly does this, and thus no expertise. Thus the contracts :-/

"The EU took a step back" is incorrect, as there simply wasn't and isn't a role for the EU here at all, even the procurement wasn't really an EU thing.