The Daily - Europe’s Vaccination Problem

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Europe’s vaccination process was expected to be well-orchestrated and efficient. So far, it’s been neither. Sabrina Tavernise, a national correspondent for The Times, spoke with our colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff about Europe’s problems and why things could get worse before they get better.Guest: Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the Brussels correspondent for The New York Times, covering the European Union.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: A cascade of small decisions has led to increasingly long delays in the European Union’s inoculation efforts. While Washington went into business with the drug companies, Brussels took a conservative, budget-conscious approach that left the open market largely untouched. And it has paid for it.Falling behind the pace of vaccine rollouts in countries like Britain, the United States and Israel, Europe is now tightening export rules in a bid to speed up its inoculation campaign and stem political criticism.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today. Europe's vaccination process was expected to be well-orchestrated and efficient. So far, it's been neither. Sabrina Tavernisi spoke with our colleague, Matina Stevis-Gridnev, about what's behind Europe's problems and why they may get worse before they get better. It's Monday, April 12th. Matina, help us understand what's happening right now in the EU with the coronavirus and vaccines.

Because from the outside, it looks like a mess. Unfortunately, Sabrina, it looks like a mess from the inside as well. Sabrina, it looks like a mess from the inside as well. The World Health Organization warned this week there are more COVID deaths in Europe now than in March of last year. We're in the middle of a third wave here in Europe. The highest per capita death rate is in Hungary. In Germany, they are seeing the numbers of infections rising. France has the fastest growing infection rate in Europe.

More than half of the EU 27 member states have growing caseloads of COVID. That's, of course, down to those really infectious variants. Politicians responding with lockdowns. New regulations in Poland, Ukraine, and France. But another piece of this worsening picture for Europe. It's been a scandal throughout the continent. Is the ultra slow pace of rolling out the vaccines. The World Health Organization has criticized the speed of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout

in Europe, saying that it is, quote, unacceptably slow. And just to give you a sense of what we mean by slow pace, about 62% of Israelis have received at least one dose of a vaccine. That's maybe 47% of British people, a third of Americans. That percentage for EU nationals is just 13.5%. And while that may be much higher than your average global citizen, it's still very, very low for Europeans. And so what is the situation with the vaccine rollout? Why has it been so slow? And so what is the situation with the vaccine rollout? Why has it been so slow? It's not the sort of question that lends itself to a simple answer. But if you remember the beginning of the crisis, this is February, March last year, when the pandemic hit Italy really, really hard.

Countries like Germany and France that had production and stockpiles of personal protective equipment like masks decided to actually hoard them and stop them from getting exported to Italy that it's not using and is not giving them to the state next door. It really was an existential problem at the heart of the EU. And coming out of that first shock and kind of regaining confidence, the EU decided we cannot have that happen again with vaccines. We can't have EU member states competing against each other to buy vaccines. And in a place that's so integrated as Europe, where borders are basically open, cross-border trade is constant, people travel all the time,

it doesn't really make sense for one country to be vaccinated and the other not to be. And so that's why the European Union became the leader in procuring and negotiating those vaccines on behalf of its 27 members. So, Matina, the idea is almost that the EU is kind of functioning as its own country, right? And by negotiating as one body, it will do a better job at fairly distributing vaccines in an orderly way. Absolutely. And that it will also get better terms for these negotiations. It will get a better price. It will get a better schedule of deliveries. But there were fundamental problems from the outset. The one is that these efforts on EU level started multiple weeks behind similar efforts

in the United States and in the UK and some other countries around the world. And as we now know so painfully, there's only a few vaccines to go around. So when you're joining second, third or fourth in that race, you're going to be potentially seeing some problems down the road. The other problem is that while the European Union shares policy on a bunch of issues, mostly economic related. It does not have much of a track record in health issues. EU guys can tell you how to do trade deals and they can tell you how to deal with tech regulation. They don't have much of a track record in sitting down with big pharma and

negotiating vaccine supply. And so what ends up happening when they start negotiating for vaccines? Well, to put it sort of simply, they go into this process, which is quite complicated, as shoppers or consumers rather than partners of the pharmaceutical companies. They have assumed that the free market is going to work perfectly in the global vaccine race.

And they put a lot of trust in these companies. They seal deals and sign contracts with pharmaceutical companies for more than a billion doses, enough to inoculate the population multiple times over. to inoculate the population multiple times over, they don't suspect that anyone else is getting better contracts, better terms than they are. And so they feel that they've actually done a pretty good job. It turns out, however, that's not exactly the case. Looking over the Atlantic, for example, in the United States, Operation Warp Speed is actually going into the vaccine development and procurement process as a partner, throwing billions at it for research and development where the EU is investing much smaller figures. Got it. So essentially, the U.S. is just

throwing money at this problem and the EU is acting more as kind of responsible stewards of taxpayer money, more kind of like a shopper, a consumer shopping for prices comparing. Exactly. And that decision and that approach comes back to haunt them. What do you mean? First, they negotiate and sign deals with multiple pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Moderna and CureVac and Johnson & Johnson for hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines that haven't even been discovered yet. a deal with this British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca at the heart of their future vaccination campaign. And the reason for that is it looks like AstraZeneca might end up being the first developing a successful vaccine. So in August, they signed an agreement for 400 million doses. And the additional benefit is AstraZeneca has said they will sell its vaccines at cost for quite an extended period of time. So this really looks like an attractive option.

But when late January comes around and AstraZeneca does have a viable vaccine and gets authorized in the European Union, the company suddenly informs the EU that it's not going to be able to ship them 100 million or more vaccine doses like it had promised in the contract because of some production problems, and is actually only going to be able to supply them with 30 million doses. Whoa, that is a huge difference, Matina. It is. It's huge. It appends plans for the vaccine rollouts in the European Union. And what sort of adds insult to injury is that looking across the English Channel to Britain, which, remember, has just left the European Union and has decided to go it alone, AstraZeneca seems to be supplying vaccines without any hiccups or any problems whatsoever.

And that country is just going from strength to strength in its vaccine rollout. Why is the UK getting all this supply while the EU is just getting this tiny fraction? Sabrina, to answer your question, you're probably going to have to wait four years until the EU-AstraZeneca legal battle plays out. Oh, no. But we do have some hints as to what's happened. First of all, AstraZeneca itself has said that we did our contract with Britain well before the European contract. The EU retorts that, well, there was never some kind of first-come, first-served clause in our contract.

So we just assumed you would continue serving us and all your other customers around the world, the UK included, at the same time. But another issue seems to be a little more complicated. It seems that the UK, and actually the United States as well, did quite clearly stipulate in their contracts with the same companies that doses produced domestically had to first go to serving domestic supply. And what that ends up looking like, Sabrina, is that virtually no doses have been exported from the United States or the United Kingdom. But it's become clear now that the EU did not limit pharmaceutical companies from exporting vaccines produced in the EU to other countries. And pretty much half of the doses produced in EU factories

have been exported for use outside the European Union. Wow. So the EU essentially did a really bad job in protecting itself in the case of a supply shortage. I mean, it sounds like the way the EU went about it just really backfired. That's exactly right. And I think that goes to the heart of the issues we were talking about, which have to do with expertise and savvy going into those negotiations with pharmaceutical companies. The EU is a global champion of free trade. It didn't come naturally to them to tell private companies that they can't export vaccines produced in the EU. And it definitely backfired. So, Matilda, there's this feuding going on in Brussels between EU leaders and AstraZeneca.

But what's actually happening on the ground in European countries? Sabrina, people are really angry. They're seeing across the channel British people getting vaccinated faster than them. They're blaming the European Union for supply failures. They're angry with AstraZeneca. A third wave has arrived on the continent. And on top of all that, their own governments, which are actually responsible for getting the vaccines to them, are failing in slightly absurd ways for the developed world. Like in parts of Germany, you can only make an appointment to get vaccinated over the phone

and people need to call 150 times. So the anger is really, really growing as we go through February and March. And when you couldn't really think of ways that things could get worse, they do. So, Matina, you said things were just about to get worse. What did you mean? Well, in early March, we start hearing about some extremely rare, very unusual blood clotting incidents in Europe. There might be a connection between the AstraZeneca vaccine and cerebral thrombosis.

That occur in people who have recently received a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The cases are so severe, including fatalities, that it wouldn't be responsible to keep vaccinating without re-evaluation. And some of those events are fatal. There are very, very, very few. We're talking about fewer than 20 deaths. And that's in the millions and millions of doses that have been distributed. So statistically, this is a tiny figure. The Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, one of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines in the world, has been suspended

in three European countries. But the concern is such that several European regulatory authorities decide to suspend using the vaccine altogether and ask the EU regulator to look into these incidents and try and determine what's going on. I mean, that's a really, really small number of people out of millions. Did it seem like the response that the EU had given was overblown? Well, actually, the European Union regulator deliberates. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the European Medicines Agency in Amsterdam to this virtual press briefing

and offers its first opinion a few weeks into March and says the committee has come to a clear scientific conclusion. This is a safe and effective vaccine. We don't think there's anything really wrong here. Its benefits in protecting people from COVID-19 with the associated risks of death and hospitalization outweigh the possible risks. We're going to keep looking into this, but you should all go back to fully using the AstraZeneca vaccine. It's efficient, it's effective, it works, and it's safe. And so those countries that out of an abundance of caution had suspended the vaccine start using it again. But the damage has already been done. People start really not trusting the AstraZeneca vaccine in significant numbers. The combination of concerns over whether it's causing blood clots,

the fighting over its supply, the politics around the vaccine, it's in the news daily. Europeans are just skeptical about taking it. And then... The Prague, after a very in-depth analysis, has concluded that the reported cases of unusual blood clotting following vaccination with the AstraZeneca vaccine should be listed as possible side effects of the vaccine. Just in the most recent days, the regulator comes back and says, OK, there is a possible link between the vaccine and those clotting incidents. We still believe that the benefits of this vaccine outweigh the risks, and we're not going to recommend suspending it. But that is exactly what some countries choose to do.

And it is chaos. Across Europe, different countries start putting in different rules. Within 24 hours, Italy says it will stop giving it to people under the age of 60 because the evidence shows that these ultra-rare blood clots are occurring in younger ages. For other EU countries, the age limit is 55. In the UK, the authorities say, no, we will continue offering it, but we will offer an alternative option to people under the age of 30. So it becomes an incredibly messy and complex picture in terms of who's using the AstraZeneca vaccine and for what part of the population that has just compounded what was already a very, very messy, difficult picture of suspicion toward the vaccine. So, Matina, where does all this leave us?

What does it mean for the EU's vaccination efforts right now? By some measures, we're in a much better place than we have been in the last few months, partly because the last few months have been a total disaster. So there is some optimism in the EU about supply, for example. They're expecting 300 to 360 million doses of vaccines. That is a big improvement to the first quarter of the year where they received under 100 million doses. That being said, they're still very much behind the U.S. and the U.K. And just to give you a general sense of their goals, which they believe are realistic, the EU hopes to vaccinate about 70 percent of its adult population fully by September. And that's roughly what we would define colloquially as herd immunity.

So, Matina, considering everything we know now, that timing doesn't sound that bad. It doesn't sound that far behind the U.S., actually. that far behind the U.S., actually. I mean, you're right in that it's probably eight, maybe 10 weeks behind. But, oh, those eight weeks are going to be so important for the EU. Eight weeks is a long time in politics, and a lot of EU leaders are facing tremendous pressures at home. We've already had one prime minister in Slovakia who's resigned over vaccine-related problems. There are governments and their futures and fates hanging on those eight weeks.

And those eight weeks also include the all-important European summer. What do you mean by the all-important European summer. What do you mean by the all-important European summer? Well, the summer in Europe is something of a mythical thing. It's very important for several economies in the EU, especially those sun-soaked, azure water, southern countries like Greece and Italy and Spain and Croatia, their economies, their employment really depend on tourist arrivals, and they've already lost one summer season. Some of these countries would face really, really serious problems if they completely lost another summer season because of slow vaccination process.

So, Bettina, I think of this kind of big global crisis as exactly the kind of thing the EU was set up to handle. So, at this moment, if you're Germany and if you're France, if you're a wealthy member country, does it give you pause about the whole purpose of the European Union? Well, let me put it this way. Euroskepticism and concerns around membership in the European Union were certainly given a face and a voice during Brexit with the UK leaving. And small contingents of Euroscepticism exist in every single EU country for totally different reasons in each one. I don't think that the balance will shift in any EU country against the EU because of the handling of the coronavirus crisis overall, or because of what's happened

with vaccines? Why not? Well, because of the 27 EU member states, the majority are a lot smaller and poorer than Germany and France. And many of them, most of them probably, would actually not even have vaccines right now if they had had to negotiate access to them on their own. And so bottom line is doing it collectively may have served the majority quite well. I think that maybe Germans and French people and Italians maybe sacrificed speed to go it together. But ultimately, they also benefit hugely from going it together.

Take the example of Germany, which probably is the country that most credibly could have done much better on its own. Germany has nine borders with other EU countries. It exports to all of these countries. The region is effectively fully integrated. In order to maintain reaping those huge financial benefits, you sort of need to have accomplished a comparable level of vaccination and immunity. And the only way to that end goal was to go it together, which is why Germany agreed to do so in the first place. So, Matina, ultimately, while the vaccine campaign was

bungled, you don't really come away from this with the feeling that what has happened poses any kind of existential threat to the EU. I mean, Sabrina, I hesitate to make predictions given how everything that could go wrong has gone wrong seemingly so far. But overall, I think that the EU takes some lessons away. And as it has done in the past, grows through crisis. It's what it does best. Fundamentally, the EU and its 450 million citizens have enjoyed much faster access to vaccines than the vast majority of the world's population. They're well on their way to resuming a normal social or semi-normal social and economic life, even if that happens a little behind Americans and British people. And so for that, they do have to credit to a certain extent the fact that they

didn't go it alone and they went to it together. Thank you so much, Martina. Thank you so much, Martina. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In a major defeat for organized labor, Amazon workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, have voted against forming a union there, ending the most significant attempt to organize Amazon workers in the company's history.

1,798 against the union and 738 for it, meaning that fewer than 30% of workers who voted endorsed a union. Organizers had argued that a union was required to combat Amazon's intense monitoring of workers' productivity and to negotiate pay that matched the high-pressure demands that Amazon places on workers. But in its successful campaign against the union, Amazon emphasized that it pays a minimum wage of $15 an hour, offers health insurance from day one of employment, and is responsive to workers' concerns without a union. No union election in decades has received this much attention. After the vote, union leaders insisted that the fight was not over.

Despite overwhelming odds, workers here at Bessemer have stood up to one of the most powerful companies in the world, to the planet's richest man. And they were heard. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vander Ploeg and Sydney Harper, with help from Asla Chaturvedi. It was edited by Anita Bhattajo, MJ Davis-Lynn, and Lisa Chow, and engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.