The covid 19 pandemic has seen its fair share of fake news, from the Chinese government’s attempt to suppress news that a new virus had appeared in Wuhan to hydroxychloroquine (or even disinfectant) being touted as a magical cure. There have been times, though, when even intelligent, well-intended and competent people have applied faulty logic to the information at hand.
One illustration were recommendations about mask-wearing in Western nations in the early months of the pandemic. Back then official (including World Health Organisation) guidelines specified that, except for front-line health care workers, only those showing symptoms of the disease should cover their face. Yet, at the same time, it was acknowledged that asymptomatic carriers of the virus were likely responsible for a significant share of infections. This was logically inconsistent. If the assumption was that masks could prevent those showing symptoms from passing on the disease, then the same reasoning should have applied to the potentially asymptomatic carrier – which, because tests were then in short supply, was almost everybody else.
It took many weeks for health officials to realise and eventually admit that their reasoning was wrong. When they did, masks soon became ubiquitous.
A lot of smart people now seemingly agree that the European Union’s vaccine rollout has been an outright disaster, which will cause thousands of unnecessary deaths. Paul Krugman in his New York Times column has blamed the alleged fiasco on fundamental flaws in the continent’s institutions and attitudes. Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian has been no less sparing in his assessment of the EU’s vaccine campaign. Vaccine doses remain in short supply, but there has been no shortage of critical voices across Europe and beyond to disparage Brussels’ handling of vaccine procurement and regulatory approval. There have even been hints of Schadenfreude in the British tabloid press with The Sun responding to the Bild Zeitung’s headline “Wir beneiden euch” (we envy you) with a “Wir beneiden dich nicht” (we don’t envy you).
If anything, the discussion is likely to get more rancorous as Europeans realise that the promise of a summer holiday free of covid is beginning to evaporate. Expect tempers to flare and the blame game to get worse.
Canada had pre-ordered enough vaccine doses to inoculate every Canadian nine times over and yet…
While it is certainly legitimate to ask what the EU and its member states could have done better, I have the impression that many are, again, jumping to conclusion. True, compared to the United States, the UK and Israel, the EU has vaccinated a considerably lower proportion of its population. But is that enough to conclude that the EU vaccination programme has been an outright debacle? Should the vaccination rates achieved in the UK (where, at the time of writing, more than 40 per cent of the population had been administered one dose, against 12 per cent in the EU) be the yardstick of success or failure?
Taking a broader look at vaccine rollouts in other rich countries, the answer appears less obvious than the current debate would like us to believe. I have taken a close look at Canada. According to Science (30 November 2020) no country had pre-ordered more doses in proportion to its population. Enough for every Canadian to receive nine doses! Authorizations for both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were delivered before Christmas day and mass vaccination efforts began on 14 December. The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have also been duly given regulatory clearance.
Yet, fast forward a few months and less than ten per cent of Canadians have received a jab – 9.88 per cent as of 19 March 2021 according to Our World in Data. A figure worse than for the EU. Has there been a Canadian vaccine debacle too?
In a zero-sum game one country’s success is bound to be another country’s failure
In fact, the explanation for the slow progress of the vaccine campaign in Canada is essentially the same as in the EU: low supply of vaccines. Lots of vaccines were pre-ordered, but Canada, just like EU member states, has found itself at the back of the queue, with deliveries plagued by delays. For the EU, this explanation remains valid even if we factor in the controversial decision to suspend administration of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine after reports of patients experiencing blood clots. The pharmaceutical company has delivered less than a third of the promised supply for the first quarter of 2021. So the temporary suspension won’t make a significant difference in the short run (although it may well make one in the long run by undermining vaccine acceptance).
The truth of the matter is that when demand exceeds supply vaccination is a zero-sum game. Every jab you get is a vaccine someone else does not get. And so the relative success of one country is bound to be the failure of another. Had the European Union been more aggressive in securing supply, this would have slowed down vaccination programmes in other parts of the world. According to EU internal documents, the bloc has exported 34 million vaccine doses between 1 February and 9 March 2021. More than nine million of these doses were shipped to the UK, while three million were sent to Canada. Even the United States have received close to a million doses manufactured on the EU territory during the same period.
While the United States recently announced that it would share AstraZeneca vaccines (which have yet to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration) with Canada and Mexico, no vaccine manufactured in the US has been exported. The same is true of vaccines made on UK territory.
Paradoxically, it is the EU that has been accused of vaccine protectionism. But as recriminations against the alleged vaccine debacle continue, vaccine nationalism is precisely the lesson that EU and, maybe Canadian, leaders are likely to draw from this episode of the pandemic.