APELDOORN, The Netherlands (AP) – Jos Bieleveldt had a spring in his stride when the 91-year-old Dutchman received a vaccine against coronavirus this week. But many think it must have taken way too long.
Nearly two months earlier, Britain’s Margaret Keenan, who is also now 91, had her chance to kick off the UK’s vaccination campaign, which has so far surpassed efforts in many countries in the European Union.
“We depend on what the European Commission says we can and cannot do. As a result, we are at the bottom of the list, it takes far too long, ‘Bieleveldt said of the EU’s executive, which may have unfairly criticized a slow rollout in many of its members. state. Cumbersome regulations and paperwork in some countries and poor planning in others also contributed to the delay, as well as a more deliberate authorization process for the shots.
Overall, the EU is doing well with 27 countries, a collection of many of the richest countries in the world – mostly with a universal healthcare system – well compared to countries such as Israel and the United Kingdom. Even the United States, whose response to the pandemic has otherwise been widely criticized and where tens of thousands of appointments for shots have been canceled due to vaccine shortages, seems to be moving faster.
While Israel has given at least one shot of a two-dose vaccine to more than 40% of its population, and it is 10% in Britain, the EU total stands at just over 2%.
And it is not just EU citizens who are putting the blame at the door of the bloc. Criticism also comes from many countries that were hoping to see a living saving liquid from the EU seep through their borders.
Amid concerns that the richer countries were receiving far more doses than they needed and that poorer countries would be left to fend for themselves, the EU would expect to share vaccines.
The rocky roll also tests the block’s long commitment to so – called soft power – policies that promote the cause not by the barrel of a gun, but by peaceful means, such as by the needle of a syringe.
“Today it is more difficult to ingest the vaccines than nuclear weapons,” said Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who was counting on much more EU aid.
Serbia sits in the heart of the Balkans where the EU, Russia and even China want a stronger foothold. Assisting the Balkan countries with vaccination was an area where Europe, with its medical skills and willingness to prioritize such cooperation, would have an advantage.
Not so far.
Vucic said weeks ago when it welcomed 1 million doses of Chinese vaccines that Serbia had not received a single dose ‘of the global COVAX system, aimed at getting affordable shots for poor and middle-income countries advocated by the EU’s And funded.
Instead, Vucic said that Serbia secures vaccines through trade with individual countries or producers.
Vucic, who rubbed salt in the wound, was searching for the EU’s social conscience when he said this week that ‘the world today is like the Titanic. The rich tried to get the lifeboats just for themselves … and left the rest. Other countries on the south-eastern edge of the EU were also critical.
This is a big turnaround from just a month ago when the EU’s future looked pretty bright. It has just reached a last-minute trade agreement with the UK, a massive 1.8 billion euro recovery and concluding the overall budget agreement, starting rolling out its first COVID-19 vaccines.
“This is a very good way to end this difficult year and to finally start turning the page on COVID-19,” said then-EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
By this past weekend, however, her attitude had weakened when it became clear that the bloc would get a slower pace than 450 million people agreed.
AstraZeneca told EU it was from the original 80 million group, will only realize $ 31 million immediately once the vaccine is approved, likely Friday. It comes on the heels of a minor flaw in the deliveries of Pfizer-BioNTech shots.
Both companies say they are facing operational problems at plants that are temporarily delaying implementation.
Italy threatens to take legal action against both parties over the delay. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte boasted that the country was a great success, especially when the millionth dose was given on 15 January. But after Pfizer announced the temporary reduction in supply, Italy delayed administering about 80,000 doses a day to less than 30,000.
Bulgaria also criticized the drug companies, and some there called on the government to go to Russia and China for vaccination.
Hungary is already doing that. ‘If vaccines do not come from Brussels, we must get them elsewhere. “One cannot allow Hungarians to die simply because Brussels is too slow to procure vaccines,” said Prime Minister Viktor Orban. “It does not matter if the cat is black or white, provided he catches mice.”
But the offer is not the only thing the EU campaign is advocating. The problem is in part that the EU Commission bet on the wrong horse – and did not get enough doses of the early success vaccines like Pfizer-BioNTech. The commission notes that there was no way to know which vaccines would succeed – and which would be the first – and therefore had to distribute orders across multiple companies.
EU implementation has also been delayed because the European Medicines Agency has taken longer than US or UK regulators to authorize its first vaccine. This was according to the design because it made sure that the member states could not be held liable in case of problems and to give people more confidence that the shot was safe.
But individual countries are also to blame.
Germany, Europe’s cliché of an organized and orderly nation, has been found to be severely flawed, with its deployment through chaotic bureaucracy and technological failures, such as those seen Monday when thousands of people over 80 in the country’s largest country were told they will have to wait until February 8 to get their first shots, even though large vaccination centers set up before Christmas remained empty.
“The speed of our actions leaves much to be desired,” said Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Processes have often become very bureaucratic and take a long time, so we have to work on them.”
It is no different in France, where there is a Kafkaesque maze of rules obtain permission for vaccination of the elderly.
In the Netherlands, which aimed to make the easy-to-handle AstraZeneca vaccine the first to be available, authorities had to scramble to come up with new plans for the Pfizer BioNtech vaccine, the ultra-cold storage requirements of which make it more complicated.
“We have been shown to be insufficiently flexible to make the change,” said Health Minister Hugo de Jonge.
Dutch people have been particularly criticized since they were the last in the EU to start vaccinations, more than a week after the first shots were fired in the bloc, and they were especially slow to deliver doses to elderly people living at home, such as Bieleveldt, a retiree.
“I’m already playing in injury time as far as my age is concerned,” he said. “But I want to play for a few more years.”
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Casert reports from Brussels. AP journalists across the European Union contributed.
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