Are you sure about that? I mean, you’ve said what you’ve said at the end there, and talked about “the general EU populace”, and yet at no point have you mentioned the individual countries.
They are the ones responsible for the rollout, for healthcare (and had the EU not intervened, they’d be responsible for procuring the vaccine as well), in short for getting jabs in people’s arms - not the EU.
However the debate from almost every one is framed as “the EU is to blame”. Why, when the only thing they are responsible for is signing these deals?
I believe that the EU operates a centralized Vaccine and procurement system, (European Commission’s strategy of joint vaccine procurement). All 27 nations signed up to this agreement. Its role is to procure and distribute vaccines to EU countries. It was also the role of the EU as a centralized body to conduct the contract negotiations with the vaccine manufacturers and provide the overall medical safety screening via the EMA.
Whilst the UK and US forged ahead signing contracts with the likes of AZ, Pfizer/Biontech and secured their supplies, the EU stumbled over their own bureaucratic mess as this new centralized procurement agency needed each country to review and sign the respective contracts with the manufacturers. The other stumbling block was price per vaccine. The EU made this their primary focus and it only served to delay the signing of contracts with AZ and Pfizer. So the EU finally signed their vaccine contracts 4 months after the UK and US. To cap it all off the contacts they did sign were flaky, and did not provide enough governance around deliverables.
The EU were late to the party and this resulted in procurement issues which then become distribution problems, which ultimately means that member states are not getting enough vaccines.
The other thing that the EU are responsible for is the amount and level of contradictory stories that keep emerging out of Berlin. AZ is is safe? is it not? Who knows? This communication management is also playing a part in many people across EU member states not taking up their vaccine slots. The EU has mishandled this key element of the vaccine rollout. We now have the EMA saying its safe and Berlin saying hold on its not that safe.
We also now see different member states going their own way and securing deals with manufactures themselves (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Croatia). So it all looks a bit of a mess right now.
Yes each individual state is responsible for putting needles into their peoples arms, but the EU as a centralized governing body is also responsible.
