This is the charge Marstercard levies on merchants in the EU, so it has nothing to do with UK legislation, and EU legislation doesn't impose the limit on orders from outside the EU.

Sure, but that won't stop MC from raising the prices now that the UK no longer has the bargaining power of the EU behind it. What are they going to do, forbid MC from operating in the UK alone? But the threat of all of the EU banning a particular card issuer has some serious teeth in it.

The EU has so much bargaining power that in fact they have the greatest bargaining power of all. Nobody has so much bargaining power like the EU. Before the EU people didn't even know what bargaining power means.

The EU has so much bargaining power that countries like the UAE or Israel could never get hold of more vaccines than the EU -.-

I did a quick search. UAE and Israel have about 9 million population each.

The EU has a population of about 447 million.

Seems like these two countries are 2% of EU in terms of population.

Doesn't change the fact that countries like Israel were able to secure more vaccines relatively to their population (and their GDP) than the EU has so far. Seems like Israel negotiated better than the EU despite the EU constantly self proclaiming to be the best negotiator with the best bargaining power in the world. So far Israel has negotiated and the EU resorts to threatening vaccine nationalism. From the downvotes I can only imply that truth does hurt sometimes.

If I have 5 guests, I can go to a supermarket and buy 5 beers.

If I have 5000 guests, I have to find a beer maker who can make and deliver 5000 beers by a given date. The difference in the challenge is obvious, to any rational observer.

But sure, from far enough, both things can be described as "buying beers for guests".

And more importantly: you can afford to pay twice as much because in absolute terms that's not a huge amount for a relatively rich country as Israel. The EU on a per-capita basis isn't nearly as rich and isn't going to give the medical companies all of their data.

It's about as apples-to-oranges as you can get.

Actually, Israel could not really negotiate because they are quite small and do not produce the vaccine locally, so had no leverage at all.

What happened is what always happens when you really want something but are not in a position to negotiate: You end up paying a lot of money. Israel is said to be paying $47 for the Pfizer vaccine while the US are paying $19.50, and the EU... $14.76. [1]

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-to-be-paying-avera...