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Comment by apexalpha | Hacker News Reader

The US put an export ban on basically everything regarding vaccines, very early on. If you look at the amount of vaccines produced, the US and EU are fairly close to each other.

The difference in Vaccine rollout comes from the fact that the EU exports vaccines to other countries while the US does not.

As a European I would've been in favour of more export controls, but a total ban seems to go too far. Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

Then again, the EU exported to countries that are now further ahead than the EU itself, which seems the other extreme end.

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> Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

I don’t know what the EU governments kicked in, but the US basically threw tens of billions of dollars at the US pharma giants to bankroll the wide-scale rollout of not one but three vaccines. The patents are largely European, but the rapid scale-up of production was only possible because of US contributions (true on both sides of the ocean as the US paid to build factories in Europe too in exchange for priority access).

But on a larger scale, individual outcomes are somewhat meaningless in the scope of government. Each country’s government has a duty to protect the public health of its citizens, which means trying to get to herd immunity within its own population. It’s like putting on your own mask before helping someone else.

The EU approached the vaccine production with hopeless naivete while the UK and US approached it like they were at war.

Biden speaks in a nicer manner but he is still doing the policies of Trump's America First.

IMHO we in Europe should return the favour and start working with the Chinese on vaccine production. They are the only ones with an industrial capacity comparable to the US.

The US and UK approach it as if they are at war with everyone else. It is very sad to see where their priorities really are when this is a global issue not separated by borders.

The resulting chip shortage and the state which India is in will also affect the US and UK even if they don't think it will.

The West has a deep obligation to end the pandemic globally, but it also has every right to end the pandemic at home first. Israel, the US, and the UK are acting like they're at war against the pandemic, and finally, they're winning.

But other countries have acted as though there was an infectious disease outbreak, haven't had the deaths and don't need to "win" because they didn't "loose" in the first place.

Yes, China was very successful at containing the outbreak by welding the ill into their apartment buildings. Australia and New Zealand had the benefit of their rather extreme isolation from the rest of the world. India looked like it was doing great til it wasn't.

> As a European I would've been in favour of more export controls, but a total ban seems to go too far. Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

I don’t know if my intuition is correct, but reigning in COVID’s R₀ worldwide at once seems like a moonshot in current state of civilization (keeping in mind its mutations and all).

Meanwhile, for better or for worse, the planet isn’t a single community: given border controls that can serve as a barrier to virus spread, it might just be more realistic to get things under control in smaller disconnected populations, which can then “bubble up”, restore quality of life and allow freedom of movement between themselves while at the same time helping bring other parts of the world back up to speed.

And yes, this does smell of the trolley problem and I wouldn’t want to be the person who would have to make such a decision.

> Why should 18 years olds in the EU/US receive a vaccine before 75 year olds in other countries?

Because a nation state has a duty to protect the safety of its own citizens first and foremost. If a government continuously puts the needs of other countries over the needs of its own citizens, who is going to support a system like that long-term? Perhaps a handful of upper-middle-class idealists, but not most people. Right or wrong, that's just not human nature.

> Because a nation state has a duty to protect the safety of its own citizens first and foremost.

I strongly agree, but that does not mean it has to be completely amoral in its interactions with other nations. Its own citizens may in fact be in favor of taking on some risk to help people beyond their borders.

There is also a pragmatic side to this. A nation that acts too selfishly may soon find itself without allies.

Perhaps I didn't put enough nuance in my response, you're absolutely right. A nation state should put it's citizens first, but that should not preclude helping others.

| If you look at the amount of vaccines produced, the US and EU are fairly close to each other.

EU has 2x the number of people.

The EU has 448 million people, the US has 332 million. So nowhere close to 2x.

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