Apparently EU bungled a major crisis again. What happened exactly?
Boris Karloff, President of England, took all the vaccines and injected them into the tip of his penis, leaving none left for everyone else.
I live in Belgium, and what I've read about the situation here (just Belgium tho, not the entirity of Europe I suppose) is just the dumbest most capitalist dumbfuckery I've had the displeasure of reading.
So basically, the government has placed orders with Pfizer for their corona vaccine. They did this with financial guarantees towards Pfizer, which pretty much meant that if Pfizer didn't manage to develop a good vaccine, or if something went wrong during production, the government would essentialy bail them out.
Now, vaccines are being delivered, although at a slower rate than previously expected (but everything getting more fucked up than expected is kind of a given now). The vaccines are being sold to the goverment, priced by Pfizer, and they assumed a vile of the vaccine was good for 5 vaccination doses. Doctors, however, have found that not five, but six (and in some cases even seven!) doses can be garnered from a single file.
Pfizer is now reworking it's price, demanding more money because of the discovery that more doses can be extracted. This of course doesn't really help the vaccination roll out plans.
So yeah fuck a system placing profits over people. But I think we all agree on that here.
Other than that, there's more bullshit going on in Europe but I don't really know what's that all about. So far I'm just trying to do what I can to keep myself and my parents safe.
AstraZeneca shipped vaccines to the UK and is now telling the EU "Soz bud, don't have enough for your order"
from what I can gather, European suppliers are selling to countries outside of the EU despite failing to meet their contracted amount to various countries in the EU. As a result the EU is trying to get the company supplying Britain (which has a better supply of vaccines) to send some of it's supplies to countries in the EU despite the fact that it still hasn't reached its contracted amount with Britain.
or something along those lines, honestly I'm probably completely misrepresenting this by accident
The eu ordered their vaccines late
Now they are trying to stop exports to outside the bloc to distract from it and Assert Dominance™It's very american
Now they are trying to stop exports to outside the bloc to distract from it and Assert Dominance™
i meant that part
what with the yanks doing a banditry on ppe shipments last year
At least that secured them many vaccines. Europe can’t even do that. Looooool.
At least that secured them many vaccines
ppe
not vaccinesngl, you give off weird nationalist vibes
There appear to be a shortage of the uk-made vaccine. Weather it was due to selling more than could be made or other factors, I guess we'll see
In Sweden we're getting 400k vaccines rather than 1m because AstraZeneca isn't producing enough and are giving the UK more (proportionally I think?). Their covid situation is even worse so I think it's somewhat reasonable
It hasn't been approved yet but that's not really the reason this is happening. Basically AstraZeneca and Pfizer are prioritising some other places that are paying better and trying to charge some EU countries more, because of course they're gonna do that if it makes them profit. The EU is having a major surprised Pikachu face moment. The UK is trying to make sure they get more vaccines than the EU because they want to stick it to the EU, and because there is no viable vaccine that any EU country has produced, the EU has to eat crow. But EU doesn't want to, so they're now threatening to block vaccine exports because "grrrrr these vaccines are MINE!".
The result is that the EU vaccine is much more of a disaster than the US or the UK, and it's not like things are going according to plan there. This would probably be solved if the EU didn't leave it up to a couple of private companies and decided to use public resources to develop vaccines, and/or cooperate with Russia and China too instead of only ordering from the US and UK, but you know how it goes.
The mood now seems to be "there's still Moderna and now Novavax and Johnson and Johnson!".
Oh, also, I forgot to say, about AZ in particular, it seems like the EU is gonna pull of a "we didn't want your stupid vaccines anyway". It's been announced that they will give the first vaccines they take from AZ to other countries, and Germany said they won't administer it to people over 65 years old.