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

301–310 of 434 posts

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#301

Post by HugoDaniel »

Bobblebobble wrote: post #292
HugoDaniel wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this comment. Could you please expand it in a more constructive way? Vaccination is not the only way available to stop the spreading of the virus: - Keep social distancing - Avoid friends and familiar reunions - Wash your hands frequently - Wear a mask - Be careful The top 5 places with most coronavirus deaths are: 1. USA 2. Brazil 3. Mexico 4. India 5. UK None of these are in the EU.

The parent comment is just saying that a poorly-run vaccination programme results in more deaths than a successful one, everything else being equal. Hope that helps.

In that logic the parent comment disregards the original comparison operands. Innocuous, irrelevant, if not somewhat offensive and disrespectful.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#302

Post by viraptor »

radu_floricica wrote: post #232
noja wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese and the Russian vaccines were not even considered. The Russian vaccine's "trial" was mostly a non-consensual trial carried out on their military. I expect this lowered confidence. Does China have a vaccine with decent effectiveness yet? Last time I read about it, the number was around 50%.

I don't see how being consensual or not has any bearing on its efficacy. Not to mention that any model I have of russian military (or any military) tells me that finding volunteers for a pandemic-ending vaccine would be a very easy task.

> being consensual or not has any bearing on its efficacy

Not on efficacy, but in reported efficacy. Basically: if you're willing to be unethical about testing X, why would we trust you to be ethical when reporting about X.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#303

Post by libertine »

erkanerol wrote: post #240

As far as I see, some people are questioning why EU didn't prefer Chinese or Russian vaccines. I know only one of the Chinese vaccines: CoronaVac (developed by Sinovac) We still don't have clear phase 3 results. The announced results (by Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia) are so different. It is not easy to trust it at the moment. BUT WE ALREADY VACCINATED ALMOST TWO MILLIONS IN TURKEY :D So the real results are coming... Ju…

Why should we need Chinese or Russian vaccines if a large part of other vaccine production is being made in Europe?

Basically USA and UK are hoarding their production and EU production, and EU are fulfilling orders for other parts of the world and not enough for itself - this doesn't seem balanced and EU should act swiftly to stop this bullshit.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#304

Post by brmgb »

ahartmetz wrote: post #190
TheMechanist wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Von der Leyen deserves all the hatchet jobs she can get... She is the child of a political dynasty and hasn't done anything well for citizens in her life.

As a French I'm still extremely bitter about the insane manoeuvering by the EPP to put her in place. Then again, finding anyone even remotely competent in the EPP is probably quite hard.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#305

Post by libertine »

niffydroid wrote: post #297

I believe the UK contract is along the lines of "once you've met our order, you can ship UK made vaccines elsewhere" If the EU commission used their head, the sooner this was met they'd get it sooner and MORE vaccines. The EU had dropped the ball, stabbed it and ran it over. They make it seem the pharmaceutical companies are out to screw them. Far from it, the risk is being taken by government's and fully funded.

Basically the EU was and still is being naive. USA and UK hoard production, while EU is seeing the stock go away.

Maybe it's time to play the same type of ball game, level the play field, and lock all exports of vaccines until orders are leveled to the deadlines established.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#306

Post by ucha »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #277
ucha wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is 3x worse than the US, 4-5x worse than the UK and about 20x worse than Israel. It's one of the few - maybe the only - developed "countries" that has both a record number of cases and low vaccination rates. How is that not bad? A lot of pro-EU people refuse to blame to commission because they see it, justly, as a vindication of the Brits who warned of the EU bureaucracy when they left. But IMO, being pro-EU s…

Please provide data. How did you make the comparison? Does it consider that these countries moved up the priority stack through shady tactics and started vaccination earlier than the EU? Are you analysing the numbers per capita? total? average in 7 days? Please be constructive.

I'm using the only statistic that matters, the percentage of the population being vaccinated. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

If the goal of vaccination is to stop the propagation of the virus, all the other possible metrics you cited are irrelevant.

Which shady tactics? Not being 3 months late to place an order?

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#307

Post by ucha »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #275
neilsense wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"not that bad" -> more people dying

I don't understand this comment. Could you please expand it in a more constructive way? Vaccination is not the only way available to stop the spreading of the virus: - Keep social distancing - Avoid friends and familiar reunions - Wash your hands frequently - Wear a mask - Be careful The top 5 places with most coronavirus deaths are: 1. USA 2. Brazil 3. Mexico 4. India 5. UK None of these are in the EU.

That's not even true when looking at deaths per capita (because how is total deaths relevant?) If you remove micro-states, the top 5 in deaths per capita is:

1. Belgium 2. Slovenia 3. UK 4. Czech Republic 5. Italy

4 out of 5 are in the EU.

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#308

Post by dogma1138 »

beagle3 wrote: post #234
dogma1138 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Israel did just that, they offered double the US price for their doses + full access to the medical data. They vaccinated half their population whilst the EU is stuck making a surprised Pikachu face.

True, but do note Israel’s population is 1/50 of Europe, so the logistics of accommodating it (on the producer side) are relatively easy.

Yes, but the GDP of the EU is $19 trillion, the GDP of Israel is $350 billion, that’s 1/50th of the population and 1/54th of the GDP.

While I’m aware that things don’t scale the same, and that currently the supply chain has its own hard restrictions on production you can’t argue that paying more won’t allow you to ramp up production faster, this is also what the UK did.

The EU could’ve allocated much more funding and ordered much more doses of both approved vaccines and vaccine candidates they haven’t they’ve put most of the eggs in the AZ basket and then tried to haggle on the price of the cheapest vaccine sold at cost.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#309

Post by oli5679 »

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.…

The EU has administered 2 doses per hundred citizens. The UK and US have administered 12 and 8 respectively.

The EU treated this like a procurement exercise, fussing over price and process and not buying sufficiently diverse portfolio.

UK and US treated this like an emergency. Every day of lockdown costs close to total vaccines expenditure, so they moved fast.

Now the EU is scapegoating a company that is producing the vaccine at cost, faster than other firms, because it is more advanced in its separate UK supply chain, that was established and approved to start distribution months ahead of EU.

Saying the EU process was different so it is understandable that it took longer, because it saved some cost or saved some duplication of procurement energy is missing the point. This is a disaster. The only thing that matters is speed!

Spiegel's article is not a 'lie'.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#310

Post by robotmay »

Ulrich2 wrote: post #276
mattmanser wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK actually ordered that vaccine way before the EU, the UK essentially paid for manufacturing to start. EU didn't, and only ordered it after it was clear it would work. 3 months later than the UK. So astrazeneca started manufacturing doses in the UK 3 months ago, but the manufacturing teething problems in the EU factory are 3 months behind. Essentially the EU, at best, are trying to jump the queue, which is very…

Well... maybe not. What the EU suspects is that vaccine that was produced in the EU with EU money was shipped to the UK in December. I have read that even until last week shipments went from the EU to the UK. If so, AZ and/or the UK government are actively cheating the EU. Is it true? I guess time will tell. Good source for latest vaccine news: https://twitter.com/QuentinAries

From the reports we're seeing over here the claim is that until the Wrexham factory came online, we were producing the vaccine in the UK but shipping it to the Netherlands for fill and finish, and then it was shipped back. If that is the case then the EC is going to look a bit stupid. If it does turn out that AZ has been shipping vaccines fully produced in the EU to the UK then I can understand their anger more, although I think it's a bit daft to make a public fight out of it - to me it would make sense that early production would be routed to the UK as we approved the vaccine earlier, and we could get a head-start on vaccinating our most vulnerable population, and then when the EU approved it later we could have returned the favour and routed some of our production back that way. But I also understand that the UK hasn't exactly inspired...confidence in our generosity in recent years.
Post reply on HN