The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine across the European continent has been marred by delays, involving quibbling over contracts with drugmakers, copious red tape, and concerns and confusion about the vaccine from AstraZeneca. With many European countries having administered less than half as many first doses per capita as the United Kingdom or the United States, I wanted to get a sense of exactly where Europe went wrong, and why.
To do so, I called Adam Tooze, a professor of history at Columbia University, who has written books about the financial crash of 2008. We discussed Europe’s vaccine stumbles and a variety of related subjects, including the political fissures on the Continent, how Europeans view the Biden Administration, and the distinct ways that the U.S. and Europe have responded to the two big economic shocks of the past two decades. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Europe has faced a number of challenges in the last dozen or so years, from the financial crisis, to Brexit, to the rise of right-wing populism. Do you see the stumbles around the vaccine rollout as stemming from the same causes as of those earlier problems?
It’s definitely a new challenge, as it is for everyone. If one takes, holistically, the COVID-19 crisis, then one would have to say all of the major states around the world have faced this crisis, and there aren’t very many states other than the handful of familiar East Asian success stories that have done well. But you’re absolutely right that, in Europe, it comes as part of the bubble of complacency that burst in 2008, and they’ve been struggling ever since to reëstablish a more positive narrative. You could argue, in fact, that the bubble of complacency burst in Europe in 2005, when the European constitutional proposals were shot down by the Dutch and the French electorates, and they’ve been struggling ever since to really get on track. Peak complacency in Europe was the early two-thousands, when they had put the euro into effect; they had a constitutional program going; and, on the other side of the Atlantic, you had all the liberal world in indignant outrage about the Bush Administration and the disastrous war in Iraq. So that was peak European complacency, and it’s been downhill ever since.
The current political leadership in Europe came into 2020 thinking they’d found the answer, which was leadership on green issues and the energy transition. And they even felt that, by staying focussed on that through last year, they were demonstrating the kind of strategic leadership that Europe needed to show. And they did put together the Next Generation EU recovery package, which they have reason to be pleased with, because it’s a remarkably complicated political edifice. But, as you say, they’ve now been blindsided by the very badly handled vaccine-policy program.
How do you understand that failure?
It’s important to distinguish three different aspects of Europe’s involvement in the vaccine saga. One is Europe as the world’s leading vaccine producer and exporter, and one of the world’s leading developers of vaccine. Then there’s the question of the E.U. Joint Procurement program. And then there’s the question of the actual rollout on the ground in individual European countries. The rollout has gone varyingly well, depending on where you look. There were some relative success stories; there were some countries that have really lagged. There has been the usual saga of regional and low-level obstructionism of various types, and the embarrassing fact that vaccine uptake in Europe varies by the day of the week—that people don’t go and get vaccinated on Sundays. Several countries or regions shut down vaccination programs over Easter. There is an inexplicable failure to wake up, smell coffee, and realize that this is something that needed to be pressed forward at maximum pace. Germany and France now are vaccinating at not quite the latest record set by the Biden Administration, but at rates that America would have been very pleased with a couple of weeks ago. Once you standardize for population, they’re heading toward the equivalent of about 2.5 million shots a day. So not bad numbers.
But they’re a couple of weeks behind, and we know, in part, this came from the fact that they were slow to actually even license the vaccines. This then moves into the procurement side of the story, which is clearly a story in which they were unlucky and a little bit late to the game. They haggled over price rather than focussing on speeding up production as quickly as they might have, which was all the more important because the most remarkable thing about the vaccine, as far as Europe is concerned, is that, unlike the United States, which has reserved almost its entire production for itself, and unlike the U.K. and Israel, which are huge vaccine importers relative to their needs, the E.U. is a dramatic net exporter of vaccines. Along with China and India, it’s among the biggest exporters. Those three places, between them, account for all of the vaccines which are in global circulation.
Most of the E.U.’s exports have gone to rich countries, including Canada, which, so far, has received substantial quantities of vaccine only from the E.U. So, from Canada’s point of view, to talk about an E.U. vaccine failure would be rather peculiar, because it’s the only place it’s getting substantial supplies from. But the better question is how on earth have the European bureaucrats allowed the story, which is so complex actually and contains light as well as dark sides, to be basically told and spun as a disaster. And that, I think, is the sort of question where you really have to ask yourself about the political competence of the current commission. Their focus on small-scale bitching with the British, the Punch-and-Judy show with AstraZeneca. Whereas what Europe really ought to have been spinning is this story of, along with India and China, being the only truly coöperative, large-scale provider.
It seems like what you’re saying is that a bunch of European countries have had trouble delivering shots at a more local level, and the E.U. screwed up in haggling over price early on when it should have just been willing to pay whatever price it would take. But, at the same time, there’s a utilitarian case that these doses have to go somewhere, and the E.U., by playing the role of exporter, is doing something important.
Yes. Another element of this is that it’s the only group of states in the world where the decisive question as to whether or not you’ll get vaccines is not market power, in the broader sense of the word. They really do have a committee that allocates its fair share of vaccines to Bulgaria, which is incredibly poor. The gap between Bulgaria’s standard of living and that of Germany is far larger than that between any of the states in the United States. And, very early on in 2020, the E.U. recognized that the most ruinous and destructive thing for the Union would be to have that nationalism operating, the sort of thing that we’ve seen from the odious Chancellor [Sebastian] Kurz, of Austria.
Can you explain what happened there?
Source link : https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-the-pandemic-changed-europe
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Publish date : 2021-04-15 07:00:00
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