The European gang that could not shoot directly

As the pandemic moves into its reopening phase, Europe’s mistakes will cost the rest of the world economically as the continent struggles to get out of the closures.

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Take the last fumble first. Several European politicians and regulators spent this week claiming the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine, the only one currently widely available in the EU, might be unsafe, just to rethink and now pray for people to start accepting it. .

This time, the concern was that the puncture was causing blood clotting or platelet problems in some patients. Some people who received the vaccine developed blood clots, but the European Medicines Agency (EMA) found that the vaccine was not associated with an increased overall risk.

Among the approximately 11 million vaccinated in the UK, severe clots were less common than expected in the general population. People can develop clots for many reasons, including other health conditions and medications. Covid-19 can also cause clots, so any risk-benefit calculation favors vaccination.

It is a piece with a clearly European security that has pursued the vaccine program from the beginning. The introduction of the AstraZeneca jab was suspended even after the EMA approved it because German bureaucrats claimed there was no evidence that it worked in patients over 65 years of age.

During the vaccine trial phase fewer elderly patients were included, but this is what the truth stated. It was quickly refuted (real-world evidence available until then from the UK proved highly effective in the older cohort), but not before French President Emmanuel Macron took up the subject.

This careless talk deterred vulnerable elderly Europeans from accepting the vaccine last month. It also skewed priority lists. Younger teachers and university professors in Italy were beaten in front of the sick and the elderly according to a plan developed when officials stated that the shooting would not work for the old.

One of the problems is that no one seems to be fully in charge of controlling safety and effectiveness. Nominally, this is the work of the EMA and the agency has commissioned it with typical Eurocratic aplomb. The EMA approval process is more bureaucratic and requires input from all EU member states. Imagine if the FDA consulted all 50 states.

But national governments are also allowed to dictate their own security decisions on an “emergency” basis. The UK used this option to approve the Pfizer and AstraZeneca features quickly despite being a member of the EU late last year.

Other governments used this discretion to slow down vaccines. EU capitals refused to follow the UK to grant emergency use permission, apparently for fear of hurting European solidarity. But some governments have been happy to impose unilateral blocs on the vaccine, as with the AstraZeneca clot lawsuit. European regulators live with the maxim “better protect than forgive”, but in this case they are feeling them without any additional security.

At least now, there are millions of doses available to Europeans who do want them. This was not always the case, after recruitment delays delayed deliveries and provoked almost several trade wars. Brussels officials last year missed the opportunity to boost vaccine acquisition to bolster the EU’s credibility with European voters. The purchase on behalf of 500 million Europeans was also supposed to give the bloc more leverage with pharmaceutical companies.

It has been chaos. The EU bureaucracy has little experience in procurement on this scale and also struggled to reach agreements across the block of fans and protective equipment. Brussels officials signed vaccine contracts months after the United States and the United Kingdom did so last year, and only after some European governments threatened to organize their own acquisition.

Washington and London understood that crucial for mass recruitment was to throw large amounts of money into R&D to many companies in the hope that some would work. Brussels focused on haggling over the cost per dose. Europeans pay a few dollars less per dose, but they ended up at the back of the shipping line.

The EU’s response – a combination of threatened export fringes, noisy trade disputes with pharmaceutical companies and sour grapes discussing imaginary efficiency problems – has mainly undermined Europe’s credibility in trade matters. It also runs the risk of fueling vaccine nationalism and restricting trade elsewhere.

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Could things have been different? Operation Trump Administration Warp Speed ​​demonstrated how a large government can use its fiscal resources to fund R&D in a crisis. The UK and Israel have shown that small countries can take advantage of regulatory agility to move forward. But somehow, the European Union — a political bloc across the continent made up of smaller nation-states — managed to get the worst of both worlds. It suffers from the heavy bureaucracy of a large government and the fight over the inefficiency of a small one.

Europeans can debate at their disposal who to blame and how to prevent it from happening again. The rest of the world can only hope that their vaccination will be shared soon.