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Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

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Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#101

Post by freeflight »

robotmay wrote: post #10

From 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…

Leyen failing upwards is a pretty accurate description of her political career in Germany.

She was never popular, one of her first "big ideas", as the head of the ministry for families, was to introduce DNS Internet-censorship against child pornography, which ultimately failed due to the public backlash.

Like many other German career politicians, her doctors dissertation was found to be partly plagiarized.

Her changes to the family allowances were across the board unpopular: High income couples profited the most from these changes, while middle and lower income classes lost out.

There's even an active committee of inquiry still going on into her habit of hiring external, private, consultants to do the work for her at ministries. As a response to that she had the data on her mobile phone deleted, official files illegally redacted, and other data, that could be used as evidence, straight up deleted.

For many Germans she's the definition of what's wrong with German politics because she didn't get where she is out of her own abilities, but rather as a consequence of her family having had that kind of influence in Germany for generations [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_family

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#102

Post by Throwawayaerlei »

maxerickson wrote: post #95
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep saying this, but you haven't demonstrated any way in which pouring more money into the process would have significantly speeded up production. Do Intel's massive financial resources allow them to profitably manufacture chips on their 10 nm and 7 nm nodes?

I mean, no one has demonstrated that it would not have either, and if you look at my comments, I've acknowledged that we don't have the information to evaluate it. And who cares if we just pissed away $40 billion dollars failing to speed things up. But look at the distribution. Pfizer submitted their results around Thanksgiving. The FDA decided they'd look at them in a couple weeks. The Federal answer to states compl…

The Federal answer to states complaining that they didn't have funds to get programs running was "figure it out".

Maybe you shouldn't live in a notoriously failed state when it comes to COVID-19 management (Michigan, which outlawed the sale of garden seeds!, Vermont is the only other state to go that far), we seem to have arrived at the gravamen of your issue with not enough money being spent. My home state is doing just fine in distributing it, spent months planning and is not making excuses about not having enough money. It is calling up the National Guard now that targets of the vaccine are changing, but that was part of the plan all along. And as I previously noted, Pfizer/BioNTech approved Friday, vaccine in hand in my small city Monday morning, first front line healthcare workers vaccinated that day using one vial. Then things really got into gear.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#103

Post by jacquesm »

dogma1138 wrote: post #19
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 b…

They could have wanted to pay that much but that does not mean that the vaccines would have been there in that quantity. Much easier to fill Israel's order at that price than Europe's at the same price or even a higher one.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#104

Post by rafaelm »

Clewza313 wrote: post #57
cosmodisk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a political suicide in many countries+ the likelihood of people wanting to take it may be on the lower side.

This. Singapore, an ethnically Chinese country, has announced they're buying Moderna, BioNTech and (Chinese) Sinovac, and approximately nobody trusts or wants to take the Chinese one.

I'm in Venezuela and we're apparently only getting the Russian vaccine. I haven't met the first person that says they're willing to get it.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#105

Post by outside1234 »

Gravityloss wrote: post #80

There's lots of medical companies in most countries of EU. Why didn't they just license some working vaccine and start cranking it out? Why does the company X developed medicine only have to be made by company X? That's against the whole idea of patents, which is making information available and usable via licensing. Money shouldn't be the issue, the cost of the shots is negligible so there is not much profit to be m…

There were multiple efforts - but no reason to collaborate.

And the French effort utterly failed to the point that they gave up. And Germany’s BioNTech signed an exclusive deal with Pfizer.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#106

Post by jbritton »

sn41 wrote: post #16
trianglem wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minor…

Looking at WorldOMeters covid data shows India ranks 105th in deaths per million(lower ranking is worse). India has one wave peaking in September and now relatively low cases.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#107

Post by maxerickson »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #102
maxerickson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, no one has demonstrated that it would not have either, and if you look at my comments, I've acknowledged that we don't have the information to evaluate it. And who cares if we just pissed away $40 billion dollars failing to speed things up. But look at the distribution. Pfizer submitted their results around Thanksgiving. The FDA decided they'd look at them in a couple weeks. The Federal answer to states compl…

The Federal answer to states complaining that they didn't have funds to get programs running was "figure it out". Maybe you shouldn't live in a notoriously failed state when it comes to COVID-19 management (Michigan, which outlawed the sale of garden seeds! , Vermont is the only other state to go that far), we seem to have arrived at the gravamen of your issue with not enough money being spent. My home state is doing…

My intent with that part of the comment was that the mindset of the people in charge at the Federal level was not one of urgency. There's not big issues with administration here, there's just not vaccines available.

I'm not sure who makes the allocation decision, but the slowest part of the administration here is the Federal partnership with CSV/Walgreens for long term care facilities (the state has allocated 430,000 doses, the programs have administered 100,000). Outside of the LTCF program, ~90% of doses have been administered.

There was a 2 week period where some Walmart decided they needed to close an aisle, no one got fined, no one went to jail, blah blah blah. (Garden stores were ordered closed for a time, but that's not outlawing the sale of seeds).

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#109

Post by outside1234 »

maxerickson wrote: post #51
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #50

Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods. Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this…

EU pre-ordered more Pfizer than the US. Enough for 150 million people in EU, vs enough for 50 million in the US. The US has ordered more after it was approved.

The EU did not pay as much as the US — and signed the contracts much later. Pfizer is doing the rational actor thing and, given a shortage, prioritizing their highest paying clients.

There might also be verbiage in the US contract to this effect. Also, Pfizer is an American company.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#110

Post by macromagnon »

smnrchrds wrote: post #59
mrtksn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese and the Russian vaccines were not even considered. Now those are used in mass vaccinations, soon EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all. People don't even want to talk about that, as if those alternatives don't exists. Non-EU countries in Europe are getting them. Serbia(6.1) and Turkey(2.3) are already close to EU average(2.6) or better on the vaccination process.

> EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all. Ouch. Reading this from Canada hurts. (We are way behind EU and I would be very surprised if we get ahead of them at any point).

Canada has no large scale vaccine production capacity so even if they could license the production they couldn't produce any decent amount any time soon.
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