Europe's Vaccine Disaster
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Europe's Vaccine Disaster
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Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#2Archive: https://archive.is/D8X6u
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#3This highlights one issue I've had with calls to secure more vaccine in the US and elsewhere. Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production - everyone has been making purchasing agreements and everyone knows that everybody is going to need it.
These pushes to outbid other countries might go toward funding additional capacity for the next pandemic, but these corporations didn't have enough warning to know that they were the ones that'd need to make this investment so, for the moment, all of these countries securing additional doses are securing them out of the pockets of other countries.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#4This highlights one issue I've had with calls to secure more vaccine in the US and elsewhere. Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production - everyone has been making purchasing agreements and everyone knows that everybody is going to need it. These pushes to outbid other countries might go toward funding additional capacity…
> Countries (notably the US) didn't work through the past year to build out socialized manufacturing capacity for additional dose production
I was under the assumption that Project Warp Speed explicitly directed funding from the US government to help ramp up production while vaccines were still being tested. Did that not happen?
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#5It's not just a vaccine disaster, it is a COVID disaster. The response to COVID in most of the developed world was a completely fuck up. We are still learning lessons that should have been learned a year ago, and there are still people everywhere - here too - that believe the best way to tackle a crisis of this magnitude is to stick your head in the sand and to pretend it isn't happening.
I've definitely lost the illusion that mankind is able to rise to the challenge as a whole species, in spite of our smarts and our ability to communicate. Some of us will, and some of us won't, the winners will be the ones that adapt rapidly.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#6It’s been a strange week. We’ve seen left and right unite against Wall Street and Dublin, Belfast and London unite against Brussels.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#7I wonder if this will become a watershed moment for the EU.
I've always been an ardent believer in the European program, both for historical reasons (I have French and German grand parents), but also because for all its warts, I believed the EU had a competent bureaucracy, able to go above the pettyness of national politics. French politicians of all side love scapegoating EU for their own failures.
To say that the current situation shattered that conviction would be an understatement. I have no admiration for the Trump administration, but they objectively did almost everything better.
It is also amusing and tragic to see all the core countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, etc.) all doing badly. They cannot frame this as a "cultural" or national failure of specific country like in 2011 at the peak of "Greek" crisis. And 2021 may well be worse than 2020 in number of life affected as populations are tired of various movement constraints, new virus strains coming up, etc.
[edit] my comment comparing US vs the EU was about vaccines, not about the COVID handling in general. For the latter, comparing policies and impact is much harder.
[edit 2] On #deaths, most countries in the EU and Europe in general did not do that much better than the US: France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands all have around ~0.08 - 0.12 % of their population that died from the disease (quite worse for Belgium). And Germany will likely reach that range as well.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#8It’s been a strange week. We’ve seen left and right unite against Wall Street and Dublin, Belfast and London unite against Brussels.
More Dublin than Belfast?
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#9It's not just a vaccine disaster, it is a COVID disaster. The response to COVID in most of the developed world was a completely fuck up. We are still learning lessons that should have been learned a year ago, and there are still people everywhere - here too - that believe the best way to tackle a crisis of this magnitude is to stick your head in the sand and to pretend it isn't happening. I've definitely lost the ill…
I think humanity (as a species) is able to overcome situations like this, but not without large loss of life (and potentially setback in culture, technology, society). So I wouldn't be too concerned about humanity, just about our current civilization.
Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster
#10From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate?
The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Which was a pretty big surprise to both the ROI and the UK. The first not being consulted on the decision, and the UK somehow being blamed for a contractual dispute between the EU and AstraZeneca. They've now backed out of this decision: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/eu-controls-on...
Even if the UK was somehow being duplicitous here, and had somehow undermined the EU vaccine program, the EC/EU has made themselves look like total amateurs by whining about it in public and trying to shift the blame and conflating the UK & AstraZeneca. I think they really need to sit a bunch of the big names down together and actually plan their public strategy; Macron's been out today going in a completely different direction but somehow also circling back to blame the UK and simultaneously claiming (falsely) that the Oxford vaccine has a less than 10% success rate in over 65s, which probably isn't going to boost vaccine adoption: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/29/emmanuel-macro...
It has been an...odd day, as someone who is a very pro-EU, remain-voting, UK citizen. God knows we deserve plenty of blame as a nation but I don't really feel like it's altogether deserved this time.