Yes indeed. The old hands always knew that, of course… but getting accused of nationalism putting your country’s interests first is a big risk to run, especially in Europe. In the end every country does it – except those which have run out of power and influence.
News today is the “Kent” variant is 2x more likely to kill you, but the vaccines do work on it. No more UK cases of the more problematic Brasil variant, which is really surprising.
The whole outlook would be absolutely awful without the vaccines. Can you imagine?
Graham wrote:
is a sharp reminder that when the chips are down nations will act unilaterally in their own interests.
To the opposite! The key reason why EU does so badly in vaccination in comparison to UK or Israel is, that the individual countries did not act in their own interest but in the interest of EU. Don’t you think that Germany would have been able to secure much more vaccine (also compared to the UK) if we would have unilaterally optimized German national interests?
In a piece of juxtaposition word-play worthy of the Brexit bus, The Guardian has this:
Clearly designed to make you think “oh, so AZ were exporting out of the EU to the UK!”, but when you read the article it turns out that those 9m are mainly (detail or source impossible, they are referencing leaked data) Pfizer.
Who knows what the rest was (or whether they weren’t all Pfizer, the nice thing about secret data is no-one can check) but with the UK having administered ~24m doses then ~9m of that being Pfizer sounds about right.
Malibuflyer wrote:
To the opposite! The key reason why EU does so badly in vaccination in comparison to UK or Israel is, that the individual countries did not act in their own interest but in the interest of EU. Don’t you think that Germany would have been able to secure much more vaccine (also compared to the UK) if we would have unilaterally optimized German national interests?
Yep, because at that point they probably didn’t realise what was likely to happen, or were persuaded to stick with EU solidarity having been assured it would be better. There is some very amusing stuff to look at, retrospectively, in the UK press where all sorts of commentators (including some members of parliament) kicked our government squarely in the nuts last summer and say that we are sacrificing old people’s lives on the altar of Brexit by opting out of the EU procurement programme…
I’m sure Germany could have produced more. But that would have required the German government intervening to ensure that BioNTech partnered with large German company for development and production, rather than Pfizer. Such an ‘obviously nationalistic’ move would have been politically impossible for a country so close to the core of the EU project.
What I was really getting at, with my point about countries acting unilaterally in their own interests, was subsequent developments such as Hungary getting Sputnik and Germany maintaining border restrictions in defiance of the EU.
Malibuflyer wrote:
To the opposite! The key reason why EU does so badly in vaccination in comparison to UK or Israel is, that the individual countries did not act in their own interest but in the interest of EU. Don’t you think that Germany would have been able to secure much more vaccine (also compared to the UK) if we would have unilaterally optimized German national interests?
I do wonder.
The power and influence of the EU is substantial.
In the alternative, it could just be the EU missed a trick, and didnt react to the need to secure supplies early on. Do remember there was probably only a three month window at most to have got yourself ahead of the queue.
One pertinent Q would be: who would spend a few BN on nonexistent vaccines? Brussels obviously would not. The UK spent 3BN on nonexistent vaccines and the bet paid off.
And 3BN is not a lot. The UK spent ~30BN on their track and trace operation, which is under criticism now that it does not seem to have done anything useful. I find that hard to believe literally but it probably delivered poor value for money, not helped by the fact that most people didn’t want to be tracked and traced to start with and many gave bogus contact details… I am sure this is true in every other country too; who wants a phone call telling them to sit at home for next 2 weeks?
In yesterday’s papers was a report that Pfizer is selling the stuff to whoever pays the most, yet Brussels is staying very quiet, not saying a bad word about it. Well, they have no choice but to suck up to Pfizer and get whatever they can get from them, having slagged off AZ to the point where there is significant population resistance to AZ.
The other misjudgement by Brussels was that they could get a great price via a bulk purchase contract. What they didn’t get is that the earth is quite big and the EU is just a little part of it, and everybody was going to be competing with them for the vaccine. All the countries with money and all the countries with almost no money and every country in between would be trying to buy the stuff. So their “buying power” was really negligible. In the meantime others realised that if they want the stuff they will have to just pay and grit their teeth.
Like I said before, a tragedy for the mainland because much of 2021 will be lost, as well as much of 2020. But it’s hard to see how it could have been avoided, if the EU was to act in solidarity.
Peter wrote:
In yesterday’s papers was a report that Pfizer is selling the stuff to whoever pays the most
I have not seen this, but it would not surprise me at all. Do you have a link?
Peter wrote:
The other misjudgement by Brussels was that they could get a great price via a bulk purchase contract.
The misjudgement on the EU’s part would appear to be thinking that price mattered. It would be a great example for a negotiating skills workshop – in years gone by I participated in a few of these at work and they were very good. The trainer asks people what matters in negotiation and everyone shouts out “price!”, then they show lots of examples of situations where price doesn’t actually matter so much and something else is more important, then you get team exercises where you are given scenarios and you must establish what matters to the other team. It can be fun and interesting to figure it out.
Everything I read in the pro-EU parts of the British press said that the mistake Brussels made was to treat vaccine procurement like another trade deal where it’s all about getting the best terms and there is no hurry to get it finalised because the other side wants this more than we do and the longer we make them wait the better deal they will give us. I’m sure the negotiators from the pharma companies were scratching their heads wondering why, given the circumstances and the urgency, the EU cared so much about the price. Apparently the EU is paying less for the Pfizer vaccine than any American buyer…
From the UK Government figures it work out that so far it has cost £4000 per person contacted by track and trace. More if you count those that did not self isolate when asked to do so.
From the posts on here it would appear that the British are far more incensed by the way that Brussels has handled the vaccine procurement than the people of the EU.
As I have written before France has been extremely slow in vaccine roll out. It has stuck with Brussels and it might well cost President Macron his job (who knows). However, if you talk to the people round here about the vaccine and when to expect it, they just give a Gallic shrug of the shoulders and acceptance that what will be will be.
Peter wrote:
One pertinent Q would be: who would spend a few BN on nonexistent vaccines? Brussels obviously would not. The UK spent 3BN on nonexistent vaccines and the bet paid off.
Graham wrote:
The misjudgement on the EU’s part would appear to be thinking that price mattered.
These I think are the core of the EU’s problem with vaccine procurement, not the fact that they acted together. Acting together just avoided smaller states getting kicked down the priority queue, so was very helpful for smaller states. But I think worrying about price was the real issue.
I never heard of Ursula von der Leyen prior to her taking up the head of the EU Commission role, but I understand that her political career prematurely ended in Germany due to some scandal surrounding over spending on military projects. (I’m sure our German members can clarify). I can’t help but think that if manage to recover your career by luck (her getting that role, only came about by a lot of chance) and you have just recovered from an overspending scandal, and you’re just about to go on a massive spending spree in your new role, you might be inclined to look extra hard at the costs. But of course this is one case where nobody cares about costs! Any price would be cheap. Her previous experience may have been working against her.
Sure; that’s possible, but surely it is totally wrong for one person (of any competence, let alone one with a competence which, according to a German-based family member of mine, was generally regarded as so poor that she got the EU job to get her out of the way) to have so much power over the management of what was already clearly visible as a huge issue. But yes she is powerful, as evidenced by the Irish border debacle which is now known to have been cooked up by her small group “upstairs”.
It’s going to be fascinating when all the dirt comes out in a year or two’s time 
Then, the films…
But still every day I see the utter tragedy of it, with e.g. a contact in N Italy in despair, with the country locking down, her schoolkids and all stuck at home, just as the wx is improving. The Italians are certainly not doing a Gallic shrug. Whether, as alleged, Italy is sitting on millions of doses which they can’t distribute, nobody wants to talk about.
