Great post. I wonder if a person like Monet could be as effective today, or whether he would become the target of conspiracies because he was so well connected and information about people like that can spread so much more rapidly.
I find myself torn between admiration for the European project and all the solving of coordination problems it entails and exasperation with the endless bureaucracy and boneheaded thinking that seems endemic to such institutions. There’s no better example than the recent vaccine debacle, which has probably killed tens of thousands of Europeans due to poor government choices.
Looking back at the history of continental Europe, it looks to me we can either have bureaucracy or bureaucracy plus war. Pick one. That being said, it’s not so clear to me what went wrong with the EU vaccination strategy. (Admittedly, I haven’t been following it closely.) EU did pretty well in its own area, that is coordination. It managed to get the authority to act on behalf of the member states and prevent bidding wars that would otherwise end up with all the vaccines going to Germany and none to Bulgaria. It (as far as I understand) signed cheapskate contracts with the pharma companies and once it became clear that all the contracts cannot be fulfilled the companies have chosen to serve the more lucrative customers first. But on the other hand, I am not sure whether the countries that paid more did consider it a victory back then. It may as well be that they’ve got lucky just because they had lousy negotiators. Anyway, none of this is related to bureaucracy. The Astra-Zeneca blood clot hysteria, I believe, was a matter of local governments. The only related statements by EU I remember were those declaring the vaccine safe. The vaccination itself is managed by local governments and the problems can not be blamed on EU. The only obvious blunder that comes to mind was the one with threatening to block export of the vaccines to Norther Ireland, but they’ve backtracked pretty fast on that one.
I was mainly referring to the long negotiation-induced delay in the EU’s contract with Astra Zeneca. They inked their purchasing agreement a full 3 months after the UK, which is one of the primary reasons they have such a low vaccination rate in comparison.
One might say that this simply meant the UK got more vaccines, but that’s not true. The long negotiation period actually delayed the beginning of production https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-56286235
They’ve also failed to delay the second dose, which would have allowed more people to get vaccinated, further increasing the death toll.
I don’t know the degree to which this is simply due to the wrong people being in charge as opposed to poorly designed incentives or the structure of the EU itself. But as a whole, the EU has made many extremely costly mistakes.
I suspect the delay wasn’t an accident. AZ vaccine was largely non-profit. It hadn’t the same level of funded hard sell as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. AZ adverse events were hyperbolized in the media. American interests often dictate EU policy, even when it’s to the latter’s detriment. Europeans paid through the nose (10x the price) for the highly profitable Pfizer/Moderns vaccines. In short, the EU got LPG’d by mRNA...
Great post. I wonder if a person like Monet could be as effective today, or whether he would become the target of conspiracies because he was so well connected and information about people like that can spread so much more rapidly.
I find myself torn between admiration for the European project and all the solving of coordination problems it entails and exasperation with the endless bureaucracy and boneheaded thinking that seems endemic to such institutions. There’s no better example than the recent vaccine debacle, which has probably killed tens of thousands of Europeans due to poor government choices.
Looking back at the history of continental Europe, it looks to me we can either have bureaucracy or bureaucracy plus war. Pick one. That being said, it’s not so clear to me what went wrong with the EU vaccination strategy. (Admittedly, I haven’t been following it closely.) EU did pretty well in its own area, that is coordination. It managed to get the authority to act on behalf of the member states and prevent bidding wars that would otherwise end up with all the vaccines going to Germany and none to Bulgaria. It (as far as I understand) signed cheapskate contracts with the pharma companies and once it became clear that all the contracts cannot be fulfilled the companies have chosen to serve the more lucrative customers first. But on the other hand, I am not sure whether the countries that paid more did consider it a victory back then. It may as well be that they’ve got lucky just because they had lousy negotiators. Anyway, none of this is related to bureaucracy. The Astra-Zeneca blood clot hysteria, I believe, was a matter of local governments. The only related statements by EU I remember were those declaring the vaccine safe. The vaccination itself is managed by local governments and the problems can not be blamed on EU. The only obvious blunder that comes to mind was the one with threatening to block export of the vaccines to Norther Ireland, but they’ve backtracked pretty fast on that one.
I was mainly referring to the long negotiation-induced delay in the EU’s contract with Astra Zeneca. They inked their purchasing agreement a full 3 months after the UK, which is one of the primary reasons they have such a low vaccination rate in comparison.
One might say that this simply meant the UK got more vaccines, but that’s not true. The long negotiation period actually delayed the beginning of production https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-56286235
They’ve also failed to delay the second dose, which would have allowed more people to get vaccinated, further increasing the death toll.
I don’t know the degree to which this is simply due to the wrong people being in charge as opposed to poorly designed incentives or the structure of the EU itself. But as a whole, the EU has made many extremely costly mistakes.
I suspect the delay wasn’t an accident. AZ vaccine was largely non-profit. It hadn’t the same level of funded hard sell as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. AZ adverse events were hyperbolized in the media. American interests often dictate EU policy, even when it’s to the latter’s detriment. Europeans paid through the nose (10x the price) for the highly profitable Pfizer/Moderns vaccines. In short, the EU got LPG’d by mRNA...