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'.

Its a coordinated effort, a fair comparison needs to at least take that into consideration.

Even so:

Why are you comparing "today" EU numbers with those of countries that started a one or two months earlier?

If so, what makes you think that is a fair comparison (even disregarding the cost of the coordinated effort)?

Can we compare "today" EU numbers with those of countries that have just started vaccinations? Would that be fair?

Doesn't it sound fishy to you when Der Spiegel compares a multi-country federation with multiple-languages and cultures to a single country with 9 million habitants with known shady non-democratic practices (like selling the data of its own citizens to move ahead of the vaccination stack)?

USA has administered 28m vaccines compared to the EU's 12m, despite having a smaller population.

I don't have any info on this 'shady non-democratic practice', but the reasons I have seen for other countries getting vaccines earlier is that they committed funds to build up capacity earlier while the EU haggled on price and liability law.

I am grateful for vaccine manufacturers for working around the clock to develop, demontrate validity of and manufacture, at cost, millions of doses. Scapegoating them seems misguided to me.

If you have some evidence for this shadiness, can you share it?

It was about Israel. 9m population.

The article uses Israel as the prime example.

There are multiple sources for the deal they made, here is one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-pfiz...

Your article is blocked for me because I'm not a subscriber.

I read this one, and Pfizer use of Israel medical data seems reasonable to me although worth being cautious about this type of thing.

There are other examples (UK, US, UAE) that are not taking this data sharing approach and it didn't hinder the process. This doesn't seem too related to EU vaccine woes to me.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/israel-news...

Here is the title of the article you couldn't read:

"Israel moves to head of vaccine queue, offering Pfizer access to country’s health-care database"

Guess who stayed bellow on the vaccine queue?

You should stop spreading misinformation. The agreement Israel signed doesn't allow Pfizer any access to the "country's health-care database". That's complete nonsense. Nor is there anything even remotely "shady" or "undemocratic" about it.

Israel will provide Pfizer daily aggregate data that contains no identifiable health information (as defined by the Israeli Patient’s Rights Law), or any data that may result in the identification of individuals.

The signed agreement is publicly available, is under the oversight of Israel's Helsinki committee, and is in full compliance with Israeli law. Any citizen who believes their rights are being infringed upon, can petition to the Supreme Court of Israel.

The reason Israel was able to reach such an agreement, and the EU wasn't, is because Israel, given enough vaccines, will be able to vaccinate its entire adult population by the end of March, whereas the EU isn't even close to having such capacity, regardless of vaccine access.

From the press reporting it seems that the EU was the source of delay. UK and US had no data sharing. The Israeli data sharing is because both parties want more granular information on the vaccine's effictiveness over time and by age and other health demographics. It has nothing to do with the speed at which the delivery was agreed, as evidenced by the numerous other agreements signed without such programs with US and UK.

"Meanwhile, the Commission’s negotiations with producers of mRNA vaccines were dragging on. COVID-19 didn’t just lend urgency to the negotiations: Talks were held virtually, adding an intangible complication. Austria’s Clemens Martin Auer, the chair of the member country steering board for the negotiations, remarked in late August that he had still never actually met Gallina in person — though he was by then a committed fan.

Talks with American companies, especially Pfizer and Moderna, proved especially thorny: Both reopened aspects of the contracts that had already been determined when the companies, in the view of the Commission official close to the negotiations, thought they had a bit more leverage."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/europe-...

No, the governments learned of Covid at the same time. There was no law of nature constraining the EU to start later, or compelling US and UK to start earlier.

Normally, it makes sense to do this. Negotiate price, avoid hassle of repeated procurement energy, wait until you have more certainty about trial results and manufacturing process.

This situation was a national disaster, not a normal procurement exercise. The EU should have committed earlier to a broader range of vaccines because the cost benefit was trillions of euros of human live and economic damage costs compared to billions of euro of potentially redundant vaccines.

That they didn't do this, and now are scapegoating the manufacturers, is a 'catastophe' from my perspective. Coordination and delays are explanations but not mitigations.

EU is not a country.

It's a government that was tasked with procuring vaccines, and has done a worse job.

I don't see any inherent constraint preventing them for agreeing contacts under the same terms, approving vaccines reviewing the same analysis and distributing using the same logistical processes as the UK and USA.

They had the same information and access to funds as other programs, and failed to effectively prepare and execute an adequate plan.

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 starts by naming the problems in the commission so that they can be fixed.

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.

The data is easily available by searching Google.

The EU has been slow to order doses from viable partners and always seems to be the last to approve new vaccines. Some EU countries are only now giving their first vaccines.

What shady tactics did other countries use? To be fair it’s not reasonable to demand someone show data and then allude to “shady tactics” without providing evidence, though I don’t doubt that shady tactics were probably used all around.

Does not answer the question or expand on what time interval the data is collected.

However, since you played the Google card, please take it back:

"What shady tactics did other countries use?"

Also easily available by searching Google.

Id doesn't matter at all. Facts are: Other countries placed their bets faster and started vaccination faster. First come first serve, don't see anything wrong with it.

Maybe the EU should also use shady tactics but it sounds more like a huge corruption and bureaucracy disaster.

By the way Biotech offered more vaccines and it was refused (even the CEO of Biotech gave an interview and said it was very confusing how the EU negotiated).

"Huge corruption and bureaucracy disaster"

Please provide facts before making unsubstantiated claims.

This is how fake news proliferate. Don't contribute to it.

Sure.

Corruption

Ursula von der Leyen. Just the wrong person. I would say it sounds very much like corruption to me.

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-scandal-hanging-over-urs...

Seems that France tried to help it's own company Sanofi.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/macron-accused-of-holding...

Bureaucracy

Eu approved weeks later then others. If every day counts that is in my point of view a bureaucracy disaster.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-vaccine-e...

Here also a claim from Pfilzer about ordering policy as too bureaucratically and slow.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/01/france-to-step...

Those corruption cases must be verified and dealt with by the law.

The EU latency is a well known cost of the coordinating effort of multiple countries with different politics and perspectives. EU is not a country.

Make no mistake, without the EU the peripheral countries like mine would still be waiting for a vaccine.

Make no mistake, without the EU countries like France and Germany would be having similar, if not better, vaccination numbers than the UK/USA are having now.

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?

"the only statistic that matters"

this is the kind of certainty that hides misconceptions and forces biased perspectives.

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.

I am a EU citizen, my standards are much higher.

EU didn't had to sell their citizens healthcare data to move up the stack (like Israel did). The EU negotiations with these Big Pharma corps made it wait for these 3 countries (Israel, UK and USA). Vaccinations started 1 or 2 months later in EU (depending on country).

A fair comparison would be the data of today in EU with the data from 1 or 2 months ago in those countries (per capita).

But the big questions are:

Why did we have to negotiate vaccines for a global pandemic? Why are countries moving up the stack with Big Pharma? Why is the vaccination rate higher in USA than in Mozambique?

The pharma companies you mention are all working hard to supply a vaccine to purchasers, at cost.

The idea that they have some sort of profit motive and are deliberately delaying the EU is not true. Accounts of journalists, and the companies, suggest EU delayed contracts being signed because of internal disagreements, and haggling over contractual terms.

To be honest, I don't know a thing about this topic. I just found it odd that you seemed to be acknowledging that what you called a lie could actually have been the truth. You still seem to be acknowledge that the EU is facing setbacks.

Why negotiate? Because it's a scarce resource and has to be allocated somehow.

My understanding was, that the delay was mostly because the EU went through a fast track version of the normal certification process while the UK and the US used emergency certifications.

IMHO, it is not important who started first, but about how fast you get to 65+% of vaccinations. I don't have any issue with delays early on, but right now this mixture of political power games, blaming, panic and agenda pushing is risking the whole European vaccination campaign.

> A fair comparison would be the data of today in EU with the data from 1 or 2 months ago in those countries (per capita).

Why is this a fair comparison? Was the EU frozen in time for 1-2 months last year during which they couldn't respond to the virus?

The US effort is also not a singular effort. Each state is basically running their own system.

Comparing USA states to countries is a very common practice of uneducated Americans.

Without bothering to stoop down to the ignorance in your comment, they didn't compare them to countries. They stated that it wasn't a singular effort, which is factually true as far as I can tell and refutes something you said.

In the case of health care, it’s apt because the federal government cannot force states to take actions.

They can only issue guidelines.

That’s due to being a federation. The US is not the only federation; Australia, for example, is one too, and just like the US, in Australia public health is primarily a state responsibility, the federal government provides most of the funding but the states own the public hospitals and control most of the operational decisions. Yet I never heard any Australian compare foreign countries to Australian states. Other federations include Germany, Canada and Mexico, yet I’ve never heard any German or Canadian or Mexican make that comparison either. It seems to be a peculiarly American habit.

Going from Idaho to New York is about the same shock as going from Idaho to Australia. The people who make this comparison are the ones who have actually been to many different American states instead of just reading about them on Reddit.

That's not the point, but even if it was, you could also say something like going from Kiryas Joel to New York City is as big of a "shock" as going from Idaho to Australia, even though these two places are in the same state and 30km away. Yeah the U.S is big and varied, but that doesn't mean that the political and societal structures are approximately the same as the EU.

It's probably because before the United States existed, they were separate states. Then they became a confederacy (twice). There's also the open ended clause where Texas thinks they can secede if they want to.

> It's probably because before the United States existed, they were separate states.

The same is true of Canada's provinces and Australia's states – before (con)federation, they were separate British colonies. The big difference between Australia/Canada and the US, is the American colonies rebelled first, and then federated after they had won their independence. The Australian and Canadian colonies federated (with the approval of London) into "dominions", which were more than mere colonies but rather semi-independent parts of the British Empire. (London's power over the dominions gradually declined over the decades to the point that it recognised them as fully independent countries, although neither Canada nor Australia was fully independent at the moment of their respective federations.)

(Australians call it "Federation" and Canadians call it "Confederation" but it is the same thing. Canadian confederation never produced a Confederation in the sense that the American Articles of Confederation or the Confederate States of America were.)

Also, even before the now-independent American colonies formed themselves into a federation, they already viewed themselves as a distinct nation. There was never really any point that New Yorkers (for instance) viewed themselves as New Yorkers rather than Americans or British or British North Americans. American states never functioned as national identities. (Even cases like independent Vermont and independent Texas, they saw largely themselves as Americans waiting to be allowed into the United States, there was never really any independent Texan nationalism or Vermont nationalism.) Prior to the American revolution, there was no difference between Americans and English-speaking Canadians – they all saw themselves as British North Americans. It was only after the American revolution that English-speaking Canadians stopped identifying with the label "American" and began to identify it with the other country to the south instead. The American revolution was really the formative event which split Anglophone Canada and the United States into separate national identities.

> There's also the open ended clause where Texas thinks they can secede if they want to.

Texas tried to secede as part of the Confederacy, and the attempt was crushed. Whatever rights of secession some Texans claim exist on paper certainly don't exist in practice.

There are some big differences between American states, yes. (I myself have been to a few, not Idaho though.)

But there are even bigger differences between Indian states. All American states share a common majority language (English). By contrast, in India, different states speak different languages, even completely unrelated ones (Indo-European vs Dravidian). Yet I've never heard an Indian compare countries to Indian states.

There is also a fair amount of diversity within Australia, even within the same state. Sydney is a buzzing worldly metropolis of over 5 million people, at the capital of the state of New South Wales. 1187 km northwest, but still in New South Wales, is the tiny town of Tibooburra, population 134, which I actually visited once with my parents when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I think the difference between Tibooburra and Sydney is at least as big as the difference between Idaho and New York.

Still there are a lot of variables to consider: production, distribution, shares, access, storage, etc...

In comparison to USA states, the European countries are a real mess: lots of small autonomous areas, language barriers everywhere (with some places only speaking particular dialects), hospital networks and management with wild variations (with a crude mix of private / public / semi-private-public / church / volunteer), population distribution with radical variations between country (hey Spain, how are things?), train network that still doesn't quite commute between countries because someone 2 centuries ago said that there might be a war coming anytime soon, etc...

To top all that, countries are much faster in claiming their autonomy than states (they are countries after all). This single fact has big implications in coordinated efforts.

European countries are not (just) states, they're sovereign nations. And that's the big issue of the EU. The whole system is organised in such a way that each nation can retain most of its power, which is almost always greater than that of the EU institutions.

"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/

Sort by total deaths. It is true. The parent comment did not specify the metric, every death counts and total deaths is a metric that should not to be disregarded.

You are disregarding total deaths, like a robot that only looks at percentages and ratios. These are real people.

If you remove micro-states, if you filter by this, if you only consider that, if you spin this enough, if you consider that this metric is invalid, if you this, if you that...

then what do we have for such a vague claim such as "-> more people dying"?

You yourself just said, in this thread:

> A fair comparison would be the data of today in EU with the data from 1 or 2 months ago in those countries (per capita).

Using absolute counts, Switzerland handled the virus better than Germany on many metrics despite losing a larger percentage of its people just because it's smaller. Alternatively, the UK handled it better than the EU if we ignore populations, while India supposedly handled it worse than the EU.

It's silly to do so because the country's handling of the pandemic through policies and societal responses have an impact on the people in that country (or multinational union). They should be measured based on how well they managed to protect their people. I don't really know how to relate to the logic that a less populous country or bloc deserves less criticism even if they hypothetically lose half of their population to a virus, just because they had fewer absolute deaths than a country with a far larger population.

Total deaths are an awful way of comparing countries, it's heavily correlated with population size.

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.