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by SonicTheSith 1923 days ago
The mistake the EU did with the vaccine rollout is that it was talking to long instead buying. Otherwise something that needs to be taken into consideration is the following.

Right now we have a global pandemic so all countries world wide are affected. And unless the whole world is vaccinated we won't get past it since the chance that mutations occur that all possible immune against our vaccines increases the more people get infected.

Currently there are 4 Producing Vaccine "producing" countries/groups

USA, UK, EU, Russia and China.

From these 5 groups only the EU and China are exporting vaccines. I am unsure about russia. And the Chinese vaccine is also not that widespread outside China. But I know that the EU even supplies Canada and Mexico with vaccines, while the USA and the UK have export bans. That is one of the reasons why vaccinations are slow in the EU in addition to being slow last year with ordering.

So while they have great numbers at home concerning the amount of people vaccinated. It is morally debatable whether or not that is the correct approach for a global problem.
2 comments
fuoqi 1923 days ago
>I am unsure about russia.

You can easily find this information online. The following picture is pretty clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_V_COVID-19_vaccine#/me...

Also Russia is quite open about licensing the vaccine production technology to other countries, e.g. one of the countries which will soon start manufacturing it domestically is Italy.

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mypastself 1923 days ago
Other than the US export ban, I haven’t managed to find any strong online evidence for your claims. Both Russia and China seem to have exported (or plan to export) large quantities of vaccines. And according to the European Commision, the UK does not have a ban in place, at least not officially.

My theory is simply that, at this point in time, the EU countries are insufficiently well linked and coordinated to face a crisis on this scale with the efficiency of something like the US, due in part to the variety of cultures, languages and political philosophies within the bloc.

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