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Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

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Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#251

Post by odiroot »

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…

> 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?

From what my German friends told me, that was exactly the case. And her transition to Brussels was a move to save her and CDU's face.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#252

Post by petre »

MrRiddle wrote: post #236
vixen99 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Romanian death rate per 1000 (8th highest in the world) has increased monotonically from 12.7 in 2015 by 0.1/1000 each year to 13.2 in 2020. In other words Covid has had zero effect (to one significant place) on the increase in rate of death per 1000. However to claim Covid has not been a disaster is disingenuous. On many fronts it's been a calamity though much of this has been self-inflicted.

What I believe Covid proven, at least in Serbia, is that you can’t have hospitals built 50 years ago serve almost double population of Belgrade. It shows how politicians didn’t invest in healthcare. In my mind, the whole thing is so overblown because the medical sector works on fumes. Doctors and nurses are working in Germany, and our hospital are few and far between. We have thousands of young and educated leaving t…

It's not much different in neighbouring countries. Don't know about Slovenia or Croatia but the same issues plague Romania and Bulgaria. Just Thursday night there was yet another fire at a hospital in Bucharest and another four victims.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#253

Post by QuesnayJr »

TheMechanist wrote: post #188
mrec wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the theory that the immune system response to Oxford's virus vector is mostly negating the benefit of the second dose taken 21 days after the first Do you know if there are more trials underway to verify this? I'm guessing it ties in to AZ's encouragement for delaying the second dose i.e. wait until the immune response has died down. I think UK medical consensus is currently recommending 12 weeks rather than the or…

Non-sequitur, but true: this is a political hatchet job from delivered by a center-left newspaper to a center-right politician. The key to this crisis and article can be found in the middle of the article: "...von der Leyen's press department has been energetic in its defense of the Commissions actions. After all, the EU has secured rights to 2.3 billion doses of vaccine, they have pointed out, with 760 million of th…

It's not a hatchet job. The EU's handling of the vaccine has turned into an incredible disaster. Given the stakes, and the magnitude of the disaster, it's only natural the architect of that disaster get evaluated critically.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#254

Post by odiroot »

tehjoker wrote: post #112
outside1234 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the vaccines were developed publicly, there would be no reason not to collaborate.

Then, knowing EU, we would be rolling out the first vaccines in 2022 or later.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#255

Post by HugoDaniel »

"Europe is facing a vaccine disaster. Whereas countries like Israel, Britain and the United States. are quickly moving ahead with vaccinations, the EU is reeling from a string of setbacks. "

this is a lie, per capita EU is not that bad considering that it is a coordinated effort (as opposed to a singular effort by a singular country).

Overall this is Der Spiegel making an opinion article disguised as a news article. Shame on them.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#256

Post by lacogubik »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #140
tehjoker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the vaccines were developed publicly, there would be no reason not to collaborate.

It is at least partly developed (or funded) publicly. Lots of comments are complaining about how EU "paid less" for the vaccine than country XYZ, but actually EU funded AstraZeneca with hundreds of millions of euros to develop the vaccine in the first place. In any case unless AZ, EU etc. are able to come to reasonable agreement I think this might eventually lead to EU simply breaking the patent and then anyone can m…

Oxford A/Z vaccine was developed at Oxford university and AZ joined later to manufacture it (after UK gov intervened, Oxford team was originally in talks with US Merck). This article [1] has back story.

EU paid millions to pharma companies (€1.78bn), that's true. However UK paid more than that(€1.9bn) and US invested even more €9bn.[1] I personally do not understand why EU bargained to start with and why it did not invest more, when damages are much bigger.

I do not think EU can break any patent, they do not own it. "Vaccitech owns intellectual property used in the Oxford vaccine's development" [2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jan/29/we-had-to-go...

[2] https://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-professor-oxford-vac...

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#257

Post by petre »

mikem170 wrote: post #55
fabbari wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - it wasn't, head over to EuroMomo and you'll find out that it was over[0]. Not only that, compare the excess mortality with your neighbors and the "Sweden did fine without lockdowns" sounds hollow. That would explain the restrictions. Consider that the excess mortality is just a small indicator that things didn't go well - if you plug in the equation a reduction of deaths due to other causes you figure out pretty…

The grandparent's original point still stands, this is not the disaster that the headlines portray. The U.S stands at 1 in 750 people dead from covid, mostly elderly with comorbidities, a rate similar to many other countries. That is 0.13% of the population. That's not 1 in 10, or even 1 in 100. It's not the young and healthy, either. A pretty small number. And if you are old and frail something is going to get you s…

Just take a look at Reuters' stats page. It's easy now as we have just passed 100m infections with 2m deaths. That amounts to 2 dead out of every 100, globally.

https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

Death rate is 0.16% in the US though.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#258

Post by Ulrich2 »

kachurovskiy wrote: post #221
pelasaco wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn´t surprise me if Russia and China prioritize to sell the vaccines to other countries than attend their own population.

My parents near Moscow got a shot within a few days after asking for it.

Sure, Moscow. My relatives in Vladivostok report a total collapse of the (local) health system.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#259

Post by exporectomy »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #255

"Europe is facing a vaccine disaster. Whereas countries like Israel, Britain and the United States. are quickly moving ahead with vaccinations, the EU is reeling from a string of setbacks. " this is a lie, per capita EU is not that bad considering that it is a coordinated effort (as opposed to a singular effort by a singular country). Overall this is Der Spiegel making an opinion article disguised as a news article.…

Your response is consistent with the claim you called a lie. Adding "considering that ..." allows you to hold the EU to an arbitrarily lower standard than the other countries.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#260

Post by patall »

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…

It should be noted that von der Leyen got this job not because she was recommend by anyone in Germany. The actuall suggestion supposedly came from Macron. In the vote for her among governments. Germany was the only one to not vote for her, due to an intervention by the social democratic party that is a member of the current german government.
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