Europe is botching vaccine rollout

European countries have long prided themselves on their strong welfare states, including public-health systems. They are also convinced that the state has a big role to play in fostering the recovery after the pandemic.
The painfully slow rollout of Covid-19 vaccines across the European Union is undermining any claims that government knows best, whether at a national or supranational level. Unless Europe gets its mass inoculation programs right, quickly, it will be hard to believe that its political model can deliver better results to its citizens than what’s available in the rest of the world.
Europe hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory during the pandemic. The continent suffered a brutal first wave in the spring, as the new coronavirus revealed gaping holes in the healthcare sectors of many countries such as Italy and Spain. During the summer, the EU appeared to cope better than the US, spurring hopes that it had developed effective track-and-trace systems that could help avoid new lockdowns. However, a second wave of Covid-19 during the autumn dashed any claims of European superiority. Only some countries in Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand, have managed the pandemic competently.
Unfortunately, the EU also seems to be botching the latest, and perhaps most important, stage of virus management: mass inoculation. The European Medical Agency is taking its time to approve vaccines that have been deemed viable elsewhere. Its delay on the joint effort from AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford is understandable: The trial of this jab has been marred by problems that justify a more cautious approach than the UK’s speedy
approval.
However, the slow study of the Pfizer-BioNTech SE vaccine and the one from Moderna Inc (still waiting for the green light) is much harder to understand.
The vaccine’s rollout has been even worse. Germany, France, Italy and Spain — the EU’s largest countries — have together inoculated less than half the number of people who’ve received a
jab in Israel, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.
Germany’s effort has been much speedier than other EU states, and Italy is at least providing a dashboard to show its progress. But Spain’s communication has been less forthcoming, and France could only manage an embarrassing 516 jabs in the first week of the program. While the EMA delays and the Christmas holidays didn’t help, there are few signs that the continent is catching up quickly as it struggles with bureaucracy, a scarcity of trained medical personnel and equipment.
Europe can claim some successes. The first authorised vaccine was developed in a German lab, even though it took a US company to scale it up. However, even in research and development there have been notable fiascos, including the vaccine efforts of France’s Sanofi, which have been pushed back until the end of 2021 at the earliest.
—Bloomberg