https://www.wjtv.com/health/coronavirus/canadian-government-...
Also, the decision to bar people from getting vaccinated on the other side of the border was not solely a Canadian decision. US disallowed Canadians going there to get vaccinated too. There was a very short period of time between the time Canadians started going to the US for vaccines and the time US banned this practice.
Also, your link is from July. That was right around the time vaccines became abundant in Canada and vaccination was opened to all regardless of age and health status. The disappointment was in early 2021, when Canada was still vaccinating 80+ people and US decided to vaccinate all 16+ people before allowing vaccine exports here so we can at least vaccinate people in elderly care homes.
> Canadians hoping to cross the border for the sole purpose of getting a COVID-19 vaccine will be turned away, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/confusion-abounds-...
There is and has never been a US vaccine export ban, and the US has not seized vaccines meant for other countries. If I purchase an item before others, purchase by far the most quantities of that item, pay by far the most overall, and pay a considerable amount of money toward funding its development, I should expect that item before others. Any Kickstarter backer knows this; it's what the US and UK did, and what Canada and the EU did not.
The Trump administration last year signed gigantic contracts for every planned vaccine, because no one knew which ones would work. Like, enough for every American from one manufacturer, let alone the current four major available ones. More importantly, the contracts guaranteed the US the earliest deliveries.
By early June 2020 (<https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytim...>) the Trump administration had already identified and was planning to sign the aforementioned huge contracts with Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, Merck, and Pfizer. (An 80% success rate is fantastic in drug discovery.) By that time the US had already paid $2.2 billion to three of the companies. (Also note the skepticism throughout the article that any vaccines could be delivered anywhere within the timeframe the administration was promising.)
The UK signed a similar contract for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The EU and Canada did not assure themselves of such quantities. Canada also bet on CanSino because it was afraid that the US would ban vaccine exports (which, again, never happened). Of course, the Chinese did not live up to the contract.
Before you say "But what about—", the Trump executive order from December 2020 merely sets up the legal framework to prohibit exports if desired. But that does not mean that the framework is invoked. Let me repeat: The US signed contracts that were a) huge in size/scope and b) from every pharmaceutical company working on a vaccine, which c) got the country the largest and among the first deliveries. The UK did the same thing with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and spent a lot of money to retool domestic plants to produce it in addition to the non-UK doses it bought.
By contrast, look at Canada as counterexample. Consider Maclean's desperate attempt to spin its procurement difficulties (<https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccin...>). If you look past the predictable false eliding of the US's firstest-with-the-mostest contracts as an "export ban", the best the magazine can do is admit that
* all Canadian contracts with vaccine providers that actually delivered were signed between late July and late September
* all contracts were signed after the collapse of the CanSino deal, which Canada had loudly bragged about as proof of its savviness at obtaining vaccines ASAP and circumvent any perfidious US vaccine export ban (which, again, never happened), and which it has done its best since the collapse to pretend that said contract never existed
* the other contracts that the magazine cites as proof that CanSino wasn't the only basket Ottawa was putting all its eggs in are with VBI (Who?) and USask. They may or may not yet deliver effective vaccines, but it's all now a bit beside the point, eh?
(I don't disagree that to country B waiting on doses, the outcome is the same whether or not the cause is country A implementing an export ban or country A having bought up all the doses by having signed the contract first. But there is a difference.)
If the situation were different, might the US have implemented a ban on exporting doses already designated for another country, similar to what the EU did implement toward Australia? Perhaps. But, fortunately, the US never faced this issue, because of the huge amounts of money it invested a year ago and the contracts it signed with said money.
Now that demand has eased considerably, the US is now donating more doses of vaccine than all of the other countries on the planet combined.
This compares to the EU which allowed vaccine exports. Thousands of Canadians are alive today that wouldn't have been if the EU acted like the US.
Yes, the early days of COVID vaccination were predictably rocky. What's the excuse today for not working together to vaccinate the world?
Just like the US donates as much food to the rest of the world as all other nations combined and has been doing it for a century now.
US bad.
In whichever case, a few Internet Points is a small price to pay. :)
Same trick as people proudly touting that US is the #1 philantropy country, ignoring that other countries actually run efficient mutualized welfare services.
It doesn't mean the current vaccine donation program isn't a great thing, or that the US policy has been wrong. But it's annoying for people explaining a problem to see it reframed so that it shows feel-good results from the US pov.
(as for the numbers, [1] shows about >400M doses exported for China as of July 9th and ~350M from Europe as of May 6th, while [2] claims the US donated 160M doses as of now.)
[1]: https://dukeghic.org/2021/07/09/taking-a-closer-look-at-vacc... [2]: https://www.state.gov/covid-19-recovery/vaccine-deliveries/
"Canadian issues" was never the topic at hand. We were all responding to this comment[0]:
> The same issues apply to American control over European power supplies or Norwegian control over European power supplies. They aren't anymore dangerous for Europe. The main difference is our existing trade deals with the US are more embedded into the European economy than any of the other countries. We like the US now, they are our friends, but because they are more connected, we are more reliant on them than others, which is dangerous in and of itself.
user smnrchrds made his "US shutting off the tap" as an example of the perils of being economically entrenched with the US, but I pointed out that this was a bad example because there was no actual "flow" of vaccine for the US to cut off in the first place.
user TMWNN left the even better rebuttal[1] that the US wasn't even responsible for Canada's vaccine shortage--the US never restricted vaccine flow to Canada, but rather the Canadians failed to diversify their vaccine order until after their original vaccine deal fell through, and by the time they placed orders with US suppliers, those suppliers had long since made other commitments.
Moreover, you were the one who brought up the US philanthropic narrative--I mentioned donations in that context.
> But it's annoying for people explaining a problem to see it reframed so that it shows feel-good results from the US pov.
I'm sure it's very annoying when you're trying to pile-on another country and some buzzkill ruins the fun by setting the record straight. :) However, per the previous paragraph, the "problem" is that the Canadian government failed to make appropriate provisions. The US vaccine rollout actually appears to be even more of an unmitigated success story than I originally understood, and I'm (not really) sorry if that offends.
> as for the numbers, [1] shows about >400M doses exported for China as of July 9th and ~350M from Europe as of May 6th, while [2] claims the US donated 160M doses as of now
You're comparing all exports for China and Europe with donations from the US. When the US uses its economy to do good, everyone piles on about how evil it is that corporations are charging for something. When the US government gives away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of life saving vaccine, you pile on about how it should be selling that vaccine and that "giving vaccines away" is cheating. There's no way to win.
I've got to say, anti-Americanism is a really strange thing for me, as an American. I understand having criticism for the American government or various elements of American culture--I certainly have these criticisms myself, but I work hard to do what little I can to improve my country. I want America to be a force for good in the world. But I don't understand the impulse to interpret every event solely through the lens of "how can this be distorted to make America look bad?".
When I see another country that's struggling, I feel compassion for them. I want their country to improve. But most of the time when people see the US struggling, they seem to feel smugness and schadenfreude, and when the US isn't struggling it angers and annoys them. And it's not just Europeans and Canadians, but also progressive Americans.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671688 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677797