There was never a vaccine export ban by the US (see my other comment for more on this). If I purchase an item before others, purchase by far the most quantities of that item, pay by far the most overall, and pay a considerable amount of money toward funding its development, I should expect that item before others. Any Kickstarter backer knows this; it's what the US and UK did, and what Canada and the EU did not.
By early June 2020 (<https://web.archive.org/web/20200603171013/https://www.nytim...>) the Trump administration had already identified and was planning to sign the aforementioned huge contracts with Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, Merck, and Pfizer. (An 80% success rate is fantastic in drug discovery.) By that time the US had already paid $2.2 billion to three of the companies. (Also note the skepticism throughout that any vaccines could be delivered anywhere within the timeframe the administration was promising.)
By contrast, look at Canada as counterexample. Consider Maclean's desperate attempt to spin its procurement difficulties (<https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/where-did-canadas-vaccin...>). If you look past the predictable false eliding of the US's firstest-with-the-mostest contracts as an "export ban", the best the magazine can do is admit that
* all Canadian contracts with vaccine providers that actually delivered were signed between late July and late September
* all contracts were signed after the collapse of the CanSino deal, which Canada had loudly bragged about as proof of its savviness at obtaining vaccines ASAP and circumvent any perfidious US vaccine export ban (which, again, never happened), and which it has done its best since the collapse to pretend that said contract never existed
* the other contracts that the magazine cites as proof that CanSino wasn't the only basket Ottawa was putting all its eggs in are with VBI (Who?) and USask. They may or may not yet deliver effective vaccines, but it's all now a bit beside the point, eh?
no, it thought it had control over the situation and started virtue signalling that it was being ethical and that vaccine nationalism was only the sort of thing the Trump administration would do
and at the point it became apparent that it had lost control: the nationalistic flailing began
As I understood it, the US had laws necessary to administratively enact export restrictions during emergencies.
I suspect the EU didn't have the same leaver it could just magically pull. Some individual countries might, but that's no use when production is distributed across the EU.
Unlike the US the EU doesn't have disasters management agencies, many things are left for individual countries.
Generally, there is no administrative authority in the EU that can really do much -- where as the US president can take a lot of actions. The EU would like have had to draft laws stopping exports, and those could be challenged in courts, etc.
More likely, the EU just didn't have an easy button to push, and nobody has agreed upfront on which cases such button should be used.
> I suspect the EU didn't have the same leaver it could just magically pull.
it was given these powers after it was obvious it had lost control of the situation:
https://www.independent.ie/business/brexit/eu-gets-new-power...
then it attempted to use the new powers against the UK
this backfired badly: if it had been enacted it would have created a border across Ireland, when the EU had spent the previous 5 years arguing that a border of exactly this type could never be created any circumstances
at which point it was forced politically to withdraw the measures
> this backfired badly: if it had been enacted it would have created a border across Ireland...
Yeah, creating such measures overnight probably wouldn't workout well.
Had consistent and thought-out policy existed upfront maybe it would have been a different story.
Of course Brexit probably would have ruined many such plans with factories distributed throughout EU and UK.
Amazing that Canada was forced to import from the EU because we were prevented from importing from our nearest neighbour and "closest ally" and so were set back by two months on vaccinations.