Vaccine salvation remains, for now, still tantalizingly out of reach. Only about 10 percent of Europeans have received a first dose, compared with 23 percent in the United States and 39 percent in Britain.
There is no single culprit. Rather, a cascade of small decisions have led to increasingly long delays. The bloc was comparatively slow to negotiate contracts with drugmakers. Its regulators were cautious and deliberative in approving some vaccines. Europe also bet on vaccines that did not pan out or, significantly, had supply disruptions. And national governments snarled local efforts in red tape.
New York Times Article About Why Europe is Lagging Behind the U.S. and U.K. in COVID19 Vaccinations
I now understand why was one of my aunts that lives in Spain was amazed that we were already vaccinated while she being old and a teacher was still trying to get the shots and did not know when would that happen. I should not be surprised after horror stories of Spanish healthcare system being shared in sotto vocce since I was a teen.
I still hold my belief that the EU is nothing more than an economic version of NATO developed to compete against the US. But Europe has a long tradition of screwing things up and rather than being a liberalizing contract, it became a de facto economic dictatorship ran by a bunch of power hungry socialist pols and bureaucrats in Brussels. Even the Open Borders agreement which was supposed to liberate the movement of workers and trade only helped move roving bands of criminals across different nations and made it a free highway for refugees and “refugees.”
They made their bed and paying the price., we don’t need to follow their instruction book.
Our government, Germany, even repeatedly LIED to us.
They blamed the pharmaceutical companies for the delays and everything else that got criticized – and the “fact checkers” backed them up – and then when the uncensored contracts got leaked* it was clear that every delay, every accountability issue and even the number of doses ordered, which was known to be too low from the start, was the fault of the politicians, spearheaded by Merkel and Van der Leyen.
I don’t care about the vaccine, but the brazen lies they told us and the willingness with which the media and other politicians swallowed these lies are scary.
* Yes, officially we were presented contracts with lot and lots of blacked out parts. What kind of bureaucratic anti-glasnost bullshit is this?
Ok, scary.
But, are you surprised?
“Politician” and “bureaucrat” are simply euphemisms for “passion fingers”:
Everything xi touches, xi f@cks up.
Some other “developed” countries are even worse; Japan seems to be at about one percent vaccinated. Canada is a mess, too.
I remember reading about one example of what is wrong in Europe: they agreed on a supply contract with one of the vaccine suppliers, then messed it up by insisting that the vaccine supply in question had to be manufactured in the EU.
I think that was the Astra Zeneca vaccine, but am not 100% sure. Per my friends in the UK, it is manufactured in the UK. So, since Brexit, the children running the EU decided they can keep their vaccine.
Better to let the member countries die from the WhuFlu than to do business with the meanies in the UK.
Add to that, Marcon in France has a significant interest in the Pfizer consortium of companies.
why would you want to take an experimental “vaccine” for a virus that 99.5% of people recover from?
Pfft! Europe? How about California?
Just a few weeks ago on an all hands call our CEO was talking about waiting his turn to get the jab. He’s roughly worse off on the risk list than me, a cancer survivor. Yet, as I listened, I was done with mine. Inbetween shots 1 & 2 Texas opened it up for whoever wanted one.
Yet he was still waiting. Still is for all I know. You want it? Waddle down to Walgreens and get it.
Europeans hate each other. Every attempt at creating a unified Europe has resulted in a continent destroying war from Charlemagne to Hitler. This is no different, just a little more bureaucratic. Unified Europe trying to vaccinate is never going to work for the same reasons.
I’ve said on occasion that the purpose of the EU is to finish the French conquest of Europe that Napoleon Bonaparte started. The French are still massively bothered by the fact he did not succeed, and still consider him one of the greatest Frenchmen ever. Even though he barely was French, being from Corsica. Come to think of it, that’s similar to the apologist view of Stalin in Russia.
True. “We” do not hate each other. Everybody hates the french, and the french took revenge with the “Montanunion”.
Over 50% of Texas has now gotten at least one dose of the covid vaccines.