There is no guilt, as a non EU member, to be felt from our approach to vaccination, compared to the leaden, confused approach of the EU.
Replying here as the other thread is locked and this is off topic there anyway.
I wasn't implying any need to feel guilty at the British approach. I think it was Gove who rightly said (!) there should be no vaccine nationalism, and the point of the EU doing the procuring was to avoid precisely this. Given the initial limited supply of vaccine, Britain would have received less under the EU procedure. The real losers though would have been the poorer countries of eastern Europe who don't have the purchasing power.
The problem with the EU is how it negotiated. Completed negotiations with Moderna, for example, at the end of August but didn't actually sign a contract until the beginning of December! What I still don't know is how much these delays resulted in slowing down the actual production of vaccine. It may not have been quite as bad as I first thought.
Vaccination is proceeding across Europe, but a more robust approach might have meant at a level achieved by the States, if comparisons have to be made.
It is highly ironic, and not well received amongst the population that the mRNA vaccine was discovered in Germany in Tübingen, developed by BioNTech in Mainz, and was the first to be licenced, yet in Mainz there is not enough vaccine.
If the EU had put as much money into researching a vaccine as the UK did, do you think it would have been developed sooner and by this stage most of Europe would have had the jab?
The founder of BioNTech was interviewed here over the weekend and stated that lack of money was not responsible for impeding development of the vaccines. Bringing about mass production very swiftly simply isn't possible due the complexity and need for rare expertise, and that is what I fear may have been made worse by the EU's strategy.
The situation of vaccinating at full capacity will, I hope, be achieved by the end of March, but the fact it will have taken a whole quarter to get there still makes me think some resignations are in order! After that the situation should improve dramatically, but that is partly due to German govt intervention to push up production.
