Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 434 posts

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#11

Post by trianglem »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

It'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…

We all intrinsically knew what to expect from and how to react to a pandemic. I honestly believe intentional misinformation from the Trump administration caused the massive bifurcation in dealing with this problem with a united front. Asian countries did not have this problem, and look at how much better they are faring.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#12

Post by MrRiddle »

jacquesm wrote: post #5

It'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…

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed.

Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#13

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

> The EU negotiating team, according to people familiar with the talks, was intent on pushing down the price.

In the middle of a pandemic that is literally costing trillions, this seems like the EU negotiators lost sight of the big picture.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#14

Post by trianglem »

cdavid wrote: post #7

I 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 c…

The Trump administration spewed misinformation from day one that caused massive dissonance in dealing with the problem. Saying they did better when they had literally no plan and let 400,000 people die is incredible dissembling and most likely a political statement than a logical one. They literally dissuaded people from using masks.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#15

Post by d1zzy »

cdavid wrote: post #7

I 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 c…

> but they objectively did almost everything better.

Sure, if you ignore everything else they didn't. Even restricting the discussion to COVID, the reason why a lot more people have, are and will be getting infected (and die) is because for most of the year Trump didn't treat it as a pandemic. All those stupid things he said on Twitter and to the press throughout the year about the pandemic, all of that have real life consequences, consequences that we will still be dealing with at least for the rest of 2021. It's hard enough to convince most of the population to follow pandemic procedures without having the leader of the country constantly say stupid things. Now it seems impossible.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#16

Post by sn41 »

trianglem wrote: post #11
jacquesm wrote: post #5

It'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…

We all intrinsically knew what to expect from and how to react to a pandemic. I honestly believe intentional misinformation from the Trump administration caused the massive bifurcation in dealing with this problem with a united front. Asian countries did not have this problem, and look at how much better they are faring.

That was due to the lessons from SARS-Cov1 in 2003. Asian countries that did not suffer from SARS-Cov1 did very badly with covid-19. e.g. India. In India the misinformation was uniquely Indian - first they said that vegetarians will not get Covid, it came from bushmeat (ignoring the fact that human-to-human transmission was through cough droplets), then they said that Yoga fights Covid, then they blamed it on a minority gathering (ignoring the fact that people were streaming in unchecked through international airports through all of January and February 2020).

One of the lessons taught in "crisis management", it seems, is to downplay an emergency so that the people do not panic. Death due to ignorance is much preferable?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#18

Post by robotmay »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #13

> The EU negotiating team, according to people familiar with the talks, was intent on pushing down the price. In the middle of a pandemic that is literally costing trillions, this seems like the EU negotiators lost sight of the big picture.

I was under the assumption that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine was being produced at cost under the agreement with Oxford University. I'm curious as to what cost savings they were after - possibly on distribution or in establishing the manufacturing bases?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#19

Post by dogma1138 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #13

> The EU negotiating team, according to people familiar with the talks, was intent on pushing down the price. In the middle of a pandemic that is literally costing trillions, this seems like the EU negotiators lost sight of the big picture.

More importantly for a vaccine that is sold at cost, the regional price that the IA got was $3 per dose, the commission stepped in trying to get it down to $2.

Israel is paying $30 for its doses of the Pfizer vaccine and likely a similar amount for Moderna.

If the EU would’ve paid as much as Israel is for 500M doses it would only cost them 15 billion $. That is peanuts in the grand scheme of things, the UK spent 16 billion a month to cover furlough payments ffs...

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#20

Post by throwawayboise »

plandis wrote: post #4
munk-a wrote: post #3

This 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?

It did happen. But mRNA vaccines are new. The capacity needed to be built all along the supply chain. Months isn't a lot of time when you're talking about building new brick and mortar procduction infrastructure.
Post reply on HN