The EU decided to spend 750 billion euro of money it does not have (on credit - see [0]) for post-Covid recovery, but at the same time decided to save as much as possible on vaccines. I think that 'penny wise, pound foolish' applies. It would be unfair to Israel if they paid extra surcharge for their vaccines and later were told by European authorities "sorry, we will confiscate them, bad luck."

If we instead paid some 10 extra euro per dose, it would have added up to about 1 per cent of the planned recovery fund - and an extra factory or two could have been built during last autumn to start cranking out the vaccines by millions as soon as approved.

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/eu-agrees-on-750-billion-euro-recovery...

Note that for a lot of countries, with perhaps less than competent governments, that money will end up right alongside where our tax money goes, in the hands of the corrupt.

It doesn't matter where the money goes in the grand scheme. What matters is that we have enough vaccines to end the pandemic. Whatever we needed to do to achieve this is what we should have done instead of worrying about hypothetical corruption and penny pinching.

Wow, you almost make it seem like Israel has done something wrong.

Nope, it was EU. the EU wanted to wait for final, concrete results before mass adoption.

The EU was very skeptical regarding the vaccines. the EU wanted to perform bulk orders as a union which complicated the ordering process.

The issue is not necessary the number of vaccines but the entire infrastructure to ship, cool and vaccinate people.

Israel had good existing infrastructure, willingness to pay up-front and high demand for the vaccine.

* will note that Israel also agreed to share vaccination data with Pfizer to locate any anomalies\problems

There's no issue with the infrastructure, the Pfizer vaccines are not coming, because Israel has priority. I'm not saying Israel did anything wrong, they are protecting their population and payed the price for it, while EU was trying to get the price of the vaccine down instead of thinking about the consequences of every lost day.

Also if infrastructure whould be a problem, US solved it by just hoarding vaccines: at the end of the year they had 40M Moderna vaccines on stock, they weren't able to use it, but they didn't give it to other countries.

France, a while back, was receiving good numbers but were failing to keep up in terms of demand\infrastructure.

I think now EU is far more active when it comes to the efforts but initially, they were not.

It seems like there is more resistance in the EU to vaccination and data sharing than in Israel.

France has no problem vaccinating people, they just adjust their strategy based on deliveries.

If you look here https://covidtracker.fr/vaccintracker/ you'll see that on the second graph, the blue curves (vaccination) closely follow the gray curve (deliveries).

And while France is one of the most anti-vaccine countries in the world, there is still no shortage of people wanting to be vaccinated.

In the end, I just think it is just the result of negotiations. Now, it is essentially a zero-sum game, the only way to get more doses is to take it from others, and the EU wasn't as aggressive. We will all get vaccines in the end, it is just about how much you value your head start.

There's resistance to AstraZeneca vaccine, and in my country (Hungary) to Sinopharm and SPUTNIK-V. Russian troops invaded Hungary in the past, so there's not much trust in a Russian vaccine, we trust the EU and US more, but the government is laundering lots of money by getting vaccines from the east (they payed $31 per dose for Sinopharm vaccine)

You're looking at thing as they are now.

Now, as I've said, there's demand\need since the EU scaled up the vaccination efforts however, look back 3-5 months.

EU was discussing just how to split\manage the vaccines among the union members, while Israel was vaccinating at a neck-breaking pace.

While my family in EU were not sure if they want to be vaccinated, people in Israel were waiting hours in line to even get a chance to get vaccinated.

Israel currently has over 80% of the population vaccinated, I'm willing to bet that even if you provide that number of vaccines to any European country, the numbers will be far lower.

The United States was the first country to approve the Moderna vaccine. If the US "wasn't able to use it" then neither was any other country.

Israel paid a LOT more for the vaccine to ensure early supply.

They are also tiny - a lot smaller than you might think, they are not really hogging all that much supply in terms of absolute numbers.

And finally they agreed to be the research study for the world, so what they are doing does have value, even for your parents in the EU. In particular they will answer the question: If you immunize everyone does COVID stop?

“Fair” isn’t well defined at the best of times.

I certainly want this all over ASAP, the vaccination isn’t as fast as I want; my biggest concern right now is the overlap between anti-mask-and-and-lockdown protestors and anti-vaccination protestors.

I wish anti-vaccination protest would be real, that would mean that I would get my own vaccine faster, but I don't see that happening.

I'm half Jewish (49% according to 23andMe), and I have a picture of 10 people of my own family killed in a mass grave, so I couldn't be farther from an anti-semite. Also I have no problem with Israel, as I said (I have far relatives there). What I don't like is the mix of price based capitalistic distribution for the countries, but not priced based capitalisic distribution of vaccines for the people. It's fake humanitarian and fake capitalism at the same time.

Government's prioritize their own people over others, but don't want vaccines going to the highest bidder domestically for the obvious social cohesion problems that will create. Seems like a perfectly fine/pragmatic approach to things to me.

Just imagine govmts auctioning vaccines. That's how you start a revolution.

And isn't the point of govs to take care of their own people? Otherwise rich countries should right now start spending their money on solving poor countries issues, like lack of a working healthcare system.

The reason why those poor countries are poor is because of those rich countries. What you're describing is tribalism.

I hate so see how US looks at the wars it is fighting: it doesn't matter that they kill 100000 people, but the 100 Americans that died are so much more important just because they were born in a rich country.

We are all on the same planet together, and tribalism is already stopping us from limiting ourselves from using more resources that the planet can provide.

> The reason why those poor countries are poor is because of those rich countries.

Having spent a considerable length of time in some of those countries, some of it volunteering, I seriously doubt this is true in general.

It‘s typically a problem of productivity (producing low value goods), corruption, education, technology transfer, culture and so on.

It would be nice to have a simple unifying theory but I doubt it exists.

Scale matters. Let me quote Taleb:

> I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

What he meant is that while communism works in a family because the incentives are aligned, it doesn't work at society level.

I have never really understood why you can't criticize Israeli politics without it sounding like antisemitism.

It doesn’t sound like antisemitism. Some people choose to pretend all criticism of the state of Israel is.

-Israel is an apartheid state.

-You fucking nazi!

Nah, that particular comment was not antisemitism.

But to answer your question: There are a TON of antisemitic people in the world, but they know they can't talk that way, so they pretend that are "anti-Israel" instead. Most people can see right through that, some can't.

This doesn't happen to other countries, so the situation with Israel is unique.