Good post, but it needs one or two fairly minor caveats.
Firstly - The fact that the UK had been able to procure vaccine from EU manufacturers largely due to the EU collectivisation of its regulatory and purchasing regimes leans towards the view that the EU has largely screwed up in relation to vaccination, so the fact is, UK HAS outperformed the EU though it is largely by panic and fortunate accident in my opinion.
The reason I have that as an opinion is just by looking at the dismal performance of the UK in managaing the outbreak - locking down way too late, especially in spring 2020 when Italy and Spain had locked down - the UK even held major sporting events when experts were questioning the wisdom of that decision, they then locked down for too short a time, and utterly mismanaged the hospital/elderly care sector by evacuating loads of hospital patients back out to homes tryung t make space in hospitals for the expected rush - this actually helped create the huge rush back into hospitals.
About the only thing the UK got right - more by luck than judgement - was vaccine purchase and as we see, the failings of the EU helped somewhat - but since then the vaccination program has gone extremely well - the acceptance percentages being helped massively by vaccine confidence and trust, which the UK government seems to have done very well.
As far as the EU goes, yes it will produce plenty of vaccine, however its processes have been very poor, there has been more than a little political posturing, especially from Macron and probably a certain amount of butthurt in making accusations of others instead of being more introspective.
The big problem though is that parts of the EU already have a somewhat dim view of state involvement in daily life at the personal level and so vaccine resistance has been historically significant - the political rhetoric from some parts of the EU and poor management of messages has given that juandiced view something of a hook to hang on, and as a result vaccine resistance in the short term has increased, of course this may well moderate when the reality of lockdowns and increased infections make themselves felt.
So for us in Europe - pretty much everyone has had failings, the EU’s are currently to the fore. Handling pandemic emergencies where prompt decisions and flexibility are are crucial, the structural weakness of management by multi-nation committees with individual national soveriegnty mechanisms has found the cracks - it could well be a driver for much closer EU integration where decisions can be made with much less reference back to individual EU states.
Indeed, that’s what I meant by “US is the only success story so far” - it has the capacity to develop, manufacture and distribute the vaccine in sufficient numbers relying mostly on internal resources. China, for instance, also makes its own vaccine, but the roll-out is slower and apparently the quality of the vaccine is lower (efficiency < 60%).
(bolding mine)
See, that’s the kind of chain of reasoning that gives me pause:
UK has outperformed EU - agree, numbers are clear enough on this matter so far
EU screwed up - maybe so, but why is this statement always tied to UK performance? Only because the (AstraZeneca) vaccine supply was finite and the UK seems to have snatched most of it?
I think people still don’t understand what EU is (the fact that there are so many things with “Europe/European” in their names - European Union, European Economic Area, European Court of Justice, Council of Europe, European Commission, etc, etc - adds in no small measure to the confusion).
Just to use your statement as an example
IMHO, you’re mixing some things up and blame EU for some things it has no control over.
Something many (most?) people don’t realize is that EU is, in a way, a “quantum entity” - in some respects you don’t know if it’s alive until you try to poke it and see if it reacts.
Economically, EU is a “solid” presence. All it’s members must follow EU directives and regulations. The French government, for instance, cannot decide to freely throw subventions at its farmers. It also cannot make trade deals on its own, no matter what Macron says.
Militarily, EU doesn’t exist. France can do whatever it wants with its armed forces: build 10 more warships or scrap their entire fleet, there’s nothing EU can do about it. If Macron wants to arm all French soldiers with water pistols, he’s free (as far as EU is concerned) to do so.
Foreign policy gets a little trickier - EU has some presence there, but national foreign policies easily supersedes it; EU as a whole might not be happy about Germany’s Nordstream 2 gas pipeline from Russia, but it cannot stop it. Macron is definitely the boss of French foreign policy, but EU still can do some things independently, although Macron could block any EU foreign policy initiative that he doesn’t like. (very likely any EU country can do that)
How about healthcare, then? Is there a EU, as far as healthcare is concerned?
IMO, the answer here is “mostly no”. As far as I can tell, the situation is as follows:
Medicine approval: there is an European Medicine Agency (the equivalent of US FDA - it was actually based in London until 2019, when it moved to Amsterdam) which is tasked with evaluating and approving medicines for the whole EU. So for purposes of medicine approval there is a EU, though as far as I know national regulatory bodies still exist and can overrule EMA ( for instance Hungary is currently using Chinese and Russian vaccines not yet approved by EMA; Slovakia bought 200.000 doses from Russia, but apparently they are not happy with what they got, and Russia asked them to send the whole lot back)
Medicine procurement: this is done by each country independently (they still have to observe trade regulations in the process). All EU countries agreed to let EU commission negotiate vaccine procurement, but, as far as I can tell, this is a one time agreement.
Everything else relate to healthcare: funding, number of hospitals, number of IC beds, training required to become a doctor or nurse, disease prevention, vaccination strategy, public health policies - all this is done independently by each country, and EU has nothing to do with it.
So when you say " the political rhetoric from some parts of the EU and poor management of messages has given that juandiced view something of a hook to hang on, and as a result vaccine resistance in the short term has increased", you’re assuming that vaccine resistance is a result of some EU policy - but there is (and there never was) no EU policy related to vaccine administration. All EU is doing is buying the vaccines, the rest (providing personnel and equipment, vaccination strategy - who gets vaccinated first, how many vaccines are kept in reserve, etc) is the responsibility of each country.
This includes the public’s attitude to vaccines. If Macron says something on this topic (and I agree he should have kept his mouth shout), that doesn’t make it in any way an EU policy. EU has no control over what Macron says, and Macron has no control over EMA. In any case, a few days after Macron’s remark some French government officials got AstraZeneca jabs in front of the press, so I think it’s clear what the official position of the French government is.
Which brings me to the article you quoted:
I don’t know if you read it, but IMO the headline is not supported by the content of the article. The biggest error it makes is assuming that there is an EU when it comes to public attitude to vaccination.
A few quotes:
Leaving aside that Ukraine - not an EU country - is included in the study, to me it’s quite clear that there is no common vaccination sentiment across EU countries; and if there would have been an EU vaccination policy over the last 30 years (there wasn’t, 'cause vaccination was managed by each country individually), it’s obvious it cannot be applied to all EU countries - some of them are actually as receptive to vaccines as the US! By the way, is the whole US happy to be vaccinated, or only some states? The article doesn’t say… My conclusion is that in some EU countries vaccines are not trusted, but I don’t see how EU can be made responsible for this.
First, the Dutch are more willing to be vaccinated than the Americans (76% vs 70%) - very good. Second, you can see that back in October the situation was completely different - only 50% were willing - very bad. So, what changed? Was it some brilliant EU policy ? Was it the Dutch government? No idea, but I would rather bet on the Dutch government, and maybe the successful roll out of vaccines in US and UK (though the trend starts to go up in November already, before vaccination started in UK and US).
I am not aware of any EU policy directly aimed at increasing people’s trust in vaccines. However, consider this: it’s November 2020, less than 50% of EU citizens are willing to be vaccinated, and you’re in charge of the EU approval process for two vaccines (Pfizer and AstraZeneca). Would you take the chance of speeding up the approval process? Would this increase people’s confidence? What’s the point of having two approved vaccines if people don’t want to get vaccinated?
Now, I’m not saying that this is what happened, though I think it’s likely it weighted quite heavily in the decision making process. You seem to be thinking that EU approval was delayed without any good reason (just typical EU bureaucracy, collectivization,…); what I am thinking is that EU took into account additional risk factors that maybe were not present in UK or US, and decided that speeding up the process was not worth it. As I said above, these risk factors were outside EU responsibility (for instance, France apparently has a longer history with distrusting vaccines: If the French distrust vaccines, it's because they distrust their politicians | Laurent-Henri Vignaud | The Guardian , and it has everything to do with domestic policy), but then should EU simply ignore those factors?
In any case, I don’t think the approval delay was such a big factor in the subpar performance of EU countries vaccination. Sure, earlier approval might have helped, but would EU have ended up with more vaccines? The procurement process was already underway by then, and EU was in charge of procurement for Covid vaccines. So did EU messed up that part?
If there was a screw up in EU procurement, it looks like it happened mostly for some vaccines. As far as I can tell, after some initial delays (due to temporarily stopping production to upgrade capacity - and I think EU is to blame for this delay), Pfizer delivered the number of promised vaccines (in fact, I think they delivered, or are about to, 10 million doses on top of that).
AstraZeneca seems to be a different story; they fell behind from the start, and, as far as I can tell, they’re still nowhere near catching up to what they promised. The article I quoted in my previous post says that EU signed a contract with AstraZeneca back in August, one day before the UK. If that’s true (I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t tell how binding those contracts were), then EU moved actually quite swiftly. However, it’s clear that something went wrong, and EU should take the blame, at the very least for not checking whether AstraZeneca had the production capacity to deliver what they promised.
For me, AstraZeneca screwed up (or, to be consistent with my own evaluation scale, had a subpar performance) at least as badly. Not because the vaccine itself, which seem to be a solid performer (the fact that the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines have higher efficiency and fewer side effects doesn’t make AstraZeneca’s an utter clusterfuck ), but they seem to have botched the roll out and approval processes. AstraZeneca is still not approved in US, and it appears to be entirely their own fault: AstraZeneca may have used 'outdated information' on vaccine - STAT
These things also erode public trust in the vaccination process in general, and in AstraZeneca in particular; sure, a foul-mouthed Macron didn’t help either, but I don’t see how this is the fault of EU. Official EU policy is that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine outweigh the risks.
Bottom line, when it comes to the vaccination campaign, I don’t find the failures of EU that egregious. It should have done better (and that was publicly recognized at the highest levels), but some of the things it’s blamed for were out its control. I think it looks worse than it actually is, and this is due partly due to the fact that the most obvious failure - AstraZeneca procurement - was amplified by the whole Brexit debacle. Especially on this board, where everything is seen through an Anglo-centric lens
I don’t think that’s so clear cut. This reminds me of that space race joke: USSR - first satellite, first man in space, first space walk, first woman in space, first probe around the moon, first probe on another planet, etc, etc USA - first man on the moon. Winner: USA
What’s your metric for deciding who tackled the epidemic successfully? If it’s simply number of deaths and minimal economic impact, then probably China is the “winner” - their economy returned to growth already, and it looks like their draconian measures kept epidemic under control, despite the slow vaccination progress. Would you say this supports your theory?
For me the most relevant metric is the excess deaths, and the economic impact. By both of these UK looks worse than most (if not all) EU countries. If by autumn this is still true, despite the EU vaccination lag, then I will conclude that the EU vaccination program was not a failure. But I wouldn’t attribute the “victory” to EU either - it would be the merit of each country, since the outcome depended mostly on how each country handled itself; I would simply concluded that the vaccine procurement (which was EU’s responsibility), while subpar, did its job in the end.
I wouldn’t draw the conclusion that “Handling pandemic emergencies where prompt decisions and flexibility are are crucial, the structural weakness of management by multi-nation committees with individual national sovereignty mechanisms has found the cracks” in this case, simply because by my own metrics it’s not obvious that EU countries performed worse than UK or US. At least not yet - we’ll see once the epidemic its over and excess mortality numbers are available.
But I agree with you that individual sovereignty mechanisms and multi-national committees have serious limitations - I expect this to hamper EU’s economic recovery in the near future. Yet, right now that’s the nature of the animal - EU is condemned to create win-win situations for all its members. It’s a feature AND a bug. When this doesn’t happen and a country thinks (rightly or wrongly) they’re about to lose something, then the whole animal stops (or Brexit happens ). EU doesn’t do well in zero-sum type of situations, and ironically in such cases a post-Brexit UK can do better outside EU. Of course, UK is now a medium-sized fish in a pond full of big sharks, so it’s likely that it will find fewer and fewer opportunities in the future to exploit win-lose situations in its favor.
“Handling pandemic emergencies where prompt decisions and flexibility are are crucial, the structural weakness of management by
[over-centralised government which, despite warnings from planning exercises, allowed its ideological preference (for sub-contracting to its friends, at vast expense, to reinvent the wheel rather than co-ordinating properly with existing expertise in local government and health professionals), not to mention the congenital indecisiveness and inattention of its central leadership]
has found the cracks”
It’s notable that the UK’s vaccination programme was left to the professionals to organise, rather than sub-contracted to some fly-by-night flim-flam merchants who just happened to have the right contacts at Westminster.
That was a great post, and I’m not going to reply to the bits I agree with - that is, most of it.
I do mean it literally about the EU’s failure. This situation is exactly what an organisation like the EU should excel at, instead they’re doing way worse than the UK or US, and there’s no chance they’ll catch up. With all the supposed disorganisation and corruption here and in America, that shouldn’t be happening. But the EU, or the countries in it, have failed to develop vaccines, buy vaccines, and distribute them.
So on the one hand the EU is condemned for NOT behaving in like a state with a centralised policy making structure in order to address an emergency like the Covid pandemic.
On the other hand the refrain from populists and nationalist politicians is to condemn the EU because it IS behaving like a superstate and so compromises their sovereign authority.
The EU is primarily a trade treaty organisation whose most useful function is to create a single market that shares common standards and tariffs. The economic benefits are ease of trade and economies of scale that approach the size of the US and other large economic blocs.
Those functions are developed by gradual processes of negotiation.
There are other European treaty organisations that deal with defence and security such as NATO. Others deal with scientific collaboration and research.
So maybe there should be an EU organisation that deals with a collaborative approach to international health emergencies such as a pandemic. With processes that can react quickly and appropriately to co-ordinate the response and marshal resources.
Adapting the EU to this role very quickly, clearly did not work. Health issues are a national responsibility, but just about every country found shortcomings and structural problems that undermined an effective response.
I don’t think there is a case for EU bashing here. Especially give the dogs dinner that most national governments have made of this issue. Especially the UK, which aside from the vaccination program, mismanaged just about every other aspect of the emergency and this is reflected in the number of Covid related deaths. The UK body count is significantly higher than other similar sized European states.
I would say that given that this is a global emergency, something like the WHO might be a better fit to co-ordinate a global response. Whether national governments would subscribe to it, remains open to question. It has to be tolerant of large economies suddenly dropping out and retreating into the an isolationist policies.
There is much to chew over in the coming years about how to handle existential threats on a global scale.
It’s exactly that trade function that has failed in the EU. They’ve been unable to procure and distribute vaccines as well as the UK or US.
As for the UK Government failing in general over COVID, I tend to disagree with that as well. It’s been known for a long time that the death statistics have been overstated, and the Government is not fully to blame for the horrific negligence of care homes. They have to deal with isolating infectious patients every year anyway, and so should have been able to do so. I will agree that they need regulating in future though.
Negligence in care homes? As I recollect it was government policy to ‘support the NHS’ devoting resources to hospitals at the expense of care homes for the elderly and other groups. No test, no PPE and when infected patients were sent from hospitals back into the care homes, the infection spread.
The division of responsibility between under resourced care homes financed privately and by local government and NHS hospitals financed by the Department of Health has been a long standing structural failing in the UK care system. Patients would bounce between hospital and care homes regularly.
If you are arguing that the responsibility for this is wholly because of neglect within care homes and the UK government bears no responsibility. That the care homes and local authorities lost this undignfied game of pass the parcel?
Eventually there will be an inquiry and the truth will emerge.
Death statistics overstated? These are UK government statistics. Who is disputing them? Are you suggesting the UK Covid death rate is really much lower? Who says?
Care homes are just that, they are not equipped for isolating infectious patients and had neither the staff, equipment or training to do that function. It is not what they do.
The UK has done rather badly, certainly in the first 8 months or so in the Covid pandemic.
Yes I have heard folk stating that they heard from a friend of a friend that Covid was being put down on loads of death certificates even when the cause was not determined - but yet I’ve never come across a person whose family member had this happen, not come across anyone who claims it first hand. Until other evidence comes to light I treat it pretty much as an urban legend.
The care homes matter is a very different thing. Toward the earlier months of the pandemic hospitals were told to make as much space as possible for the expected rush. This involved moving as many elderly patients into care homes as possible - despite having relatively high levels of dependency, and also before there were enough reliable testing kits were available.
Personally I think that many hospital trusts saw this as an opportunity to move out what has offensively become known as ‘bed blockers’ using the pandemic as an authority to do what they had not be able to do for quite some time.
Danger anecdote alert - I have a few friends who either work themselves in the care home sector or their partners do, and they pretty much relate similar stories - that is, care homes were massively pressured into accepting hospital residents without having had proper Covid tests. Some of the care home chains folded to this pressure more readily than others, and the result was that in those homes the death rate was horrendous - in another chain where some of my friends work, the controllers absolutely would not under any circumstances accept any resident from any hospital without timely negative tests but some bed managers were… inventive. In one of those homes the local hospital trust assured the care home manager that a prospective resident had been tested.
That resident arrived, and as new residents do, this one went around the various rooms introducing himself. Two days later the care home manager received a call from the same hospital, and yes the test result had been returned positive - 8 residents died over the next month. The hospital bed manager had deceived, yes the person had been tested, but no, the result had not come back at the time.
Another issue in relation to care home chains was the shortage of staff, anyone testing positive was quarantined, quite a few were shielding their own relatives, others had been in close proximity to positive testing staff, and was a massive lack of PPE because NHS had procured it all thus breaking down the supply chains to the care home sector.
This shortage of staff meant that individuals were being deployed to multiple sites in an attempt to cover - which is a terrible idea during a highly infectious situation.
Most of this can be laid at the feet of government, both in the short term of the pandemic itself and in the longer term of failing to address the myriad problems of the care home sector that pretty much all governments over the last 40 years have just allowed to fester on and on - especially the divide between health provision for the elderly which of course of covered by NHS and care provision for the elderly which comes out of the elderly themselves and local authorities - there being a huge grey area of elderly people who need care and medical support where nobody wants to claim responsibility because it comes with a huge price tag - meantime the elderly are being milked dry of their life assets to pay for care that should properly come under NHS provision.
I do wonder if that really poor performance with the vulnerable elderly has pretty much wiped out the majority of them and is partly responsible for the current reduction in death rates.
That’s a bit of contentious claim. It has been known for awhile that the UK (England specifically) public health department has been using a rather loose method of counting coronavirus deaths that introduces potential error and likely over counts. However analyses of excess mortality seem to indicate the count is not significantly inflated. In general it is likely most countries are under-countingCOVID-19 deaths and it is also likely the UK is no exception.
The checks right now are much more to do with movement of (mainly agricultural) goods and related detection of fraud or the breaking health regulations rather than detection of nefarious people or smuggled weaponry so it makes sense - not least from a presentational point of view - to have Agriculture run it. If it were moved under the aegis of “Security” or “Defense” that would a) mean that something terrible had already happened and b) in itself count as an escalation.
Don’t forget we’re talking about a “border” between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, i.e., in the sea and air ports either side of the Irish Sea.
I would have thought there was just as much, if not more, manufactured/processed goods going the other way, which was why I was puzzled that it was Agriculture, specifically, as opposed to HMRC.
I’m not at all familiar with the Irish situation, but within the US, both California and Hawaii have inspections of all incoming agricultural produce. It’s primarily for preventing disease and pest transmission. Perhaps something similar?
), but they seem to have botched the roll out and approval processes. AstraZeneca is still not approved in US, and it appears to be entirely their own fault: 
