Vaccinations In the EU

If you haven't been paying attention ... the EU appears to be badly goofing up its vaccine rollouts. And, there is a growing 4th wave of infections over there, leading to new lockdowns.

Much of the vaccine rollout trouble appears to be nothing other than politics=deaths.

First off, recognize how amazing it is that we have vaccines at all. Prior to the last year, a safe and effective vaccine for any coronavirus has never been developed. But now we have a bunch.

Even so, we should not be surprised if some of the ones in development were duds. In the U.S., Merck abandoned its vaccine when it became clear it did not work. In France, the Pasteur Institute also abandoned theirs. Two other French companies have so far failed to finish their vaccine development.

Meanwhile, the UK's AstraZeneca developed its own vaccine, and the UK has done a solid job of vaccinated its population. The UK happened to leave the EU last year.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has been made available to the EU at cost, and they have not been very interested in taking it. Further, there are reports popping up from all over the EU of incidents of side effects .. which haven't seemed to crop up elsewhere.

Here's some data on vaccination rates:

I have not included everyone. 

Israel, the UAE, and Chile are all small countries that contracted to get vaccines early. 

The US and the UK developed vaccines and are using them.

Russia and China also developed vaccines (to much fanfare), but both lack the capability to ramp up their production.

One would think that the big 3 countries in the EU (which have been hit harder then the US) would be vaccinating as much as the UK and the US. They aren't.